"Larry Adams in the Mud on a Planet"
"Larry Adams in the Mud on a Planet"
or "Portrait of a Fellow Lifeguard of the Carmine Street Pool Circa
'66"
1966, New York City (the Greenwich Village Period)
Mixed Media on Paper,
I was the first lifeguard in New York City with long hair. They made me
wear a bathing cap. On it my supervisor wrote "PLANET MAN"
because I would share my premonitions of decades of world travels and that I
felt that the only home I had was the planet I was standing on and also because
at that time I was in pretty good shape and in my lifeguard uniform I looked
like one of those characters from DC Comics.
Larry lived in Harlem. Every now and then I'd give him a ride home on my
Honda fifty. Behind him loom the ominous clouds of the escalating Vietnam
Conflict, beneath him the mud of frustrations.
Larry, like most of us, was stuck in the glutinous mud of the Hudson Estuary,
really not the place for a city the size of New York to be. Even back then
in the 60's it was a sociological disaster.
I could sense it back then and that's how I tried to portray it. It was not what was making us human. It was what was making us subhuman. It was turning humanity into a race of mutants.
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Copyright © 2003 [Paul Hall]. All rights reserved.
email address: art@paulhallart.com