GLR January-February 2023

Jimmy noticed something and was inspired to paint a monu mental portrait of the ravaged sunflower in oils, six feet square, the first of many such portraits to come. Sunflower portraits in soft pastels soon followed, talismans of remembrance, emo tional emblems of affection, exultant lamentations. In the many metaphoric interpretations of sunflowers since that initial one, each was approached as though it was the first, and the com plexities of each figuration, grounded on observation, was to be one of an ongoing series of innovative reinvention. Exhibitions of his work began to be mounted by important galleries in New York, Chicago, and Los Angeles. Success fol lowed success, and the critics and art collectors began to pay attention. Jimmy’s work in pastels led to his joining the fore most organization dedicated to that medium in the country, the Pastel Society of America, where he is the current president. During a New York exhibition of pastel self-portraits, one of them, Self-Portrait with Green Hand , was singled out for spe cial praise. Art magazine doyens rightfully compared it to fa mous pastels by Redon, Cassatt, and Degas. (This work is now in the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art.) An exhibition scheduled for March 2023 at Corbett vs. Dempsey Gallery in Chicago will feature etchings produced in the mid-1960s. Work by Jimmy Wright can be found on-line at jimmywrightartist.com as well as in the permanent collections of the Met, the Whitney, the Art Institute of Chicago, and the several galleries that represent his work in various American cities. Best of all, after a hiatus of two years due to the Covid pandemic, Jimmy is back at his easel.

Jimmy Wright. Sunflower 1988.

blocks where the down-and-outs were sleeping in doorways. Next to a homeless shelter on the outskirts of the Bowery, they found a century-old three-story brick building on an alley. It had once been a marble tile installation workshop, and before that a stable to house work horses and store wagons. Bringing the place up to code and making it livable took a while, but Jimmy’s skill set was more than equal to the task, and the couple were soon occupants and owners with a mortgage. Jimmy and Ken worked various jobs and paid down the mortgage. Jimmy found time to paint. His work of the early to mid-1980s revisited his West Kentucky roots and started to grab the attention of gallery owners. He produced series of oil paint ings that both extended his color palate and brought back some of the cultural iconography that his first drawings and paintings had celebrated. The most notable and dramatic (and achingly homoerotic) of these series was the “Baptism Set.” Each work featured a nude teenage boy standing full-frontal in the dipping tank alongside a shirt-and-necktie clad preacher who has him “in hand,” preparing to dunk him for Jesus. In Baptism at the Obine River , Baptism at Rives , and Baptism at Pilot Oaks , Jimmy had re freshed and reinterpreted medieval and Renaissance iconogra phy of “religious” male nudity as often depicted in “John the Baptist dipping Jesus” paintings. In each of Jimmy’s updated versions, the religious essentials had been artfully queered. Not long after these successes, in 1988, everything suddenly changed for the worse. Ken was diagnosed as HIV-positive, and overnight Jimmy became a caregiver. I won’t recite the horrors of the 1980s for gay men in general as their numbers were being decimated and they became a pariah class in the U.S. Jimmy Wright was holding down a job and taking care of Ken and try ing hard not to despair. One day when he was out looking for cut flowers, he bought a golden sunflower that had caught his eye. He brought it home hoping that its sunny face would brighten the mood. Soon, when it was no longer at the center of attention and had been rele gated to a shelf, it had slipped his mind. It had wilted and dried and its petals had become shriveled and twisted. It was then that

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