Malibu morning picture of the day - Friday, November 6, 2015

Dear Family, Friends, and Gentle Readers,

We've got strong, dry, autumn winds blowing out the canyon this morning, so it's a crystal clear day at the coast.

Not much point in showing a second view today. Just another field of two shades of gradient blue.

One of the perks of working on a college campus and in my office in particular, is that I am about 300 paces away from a fairly well-outfitted library. I was over there this morning and I grabbed an oversize art book off the shelf called Sketches and Drawings of Hawaiians by John M. Kelly, printed and copyrighted in 1943.

John Kelly, Breadfruit, print.

The book is out of print and hardly anybody will see this guy's work otherwise today, so I took a few pics and am posting them here in the spirit of education, so I don't think I'm violating copyright and am within fair use.

John Kelly,
Chinese Costume,
print.

As I look through the book, his subjects are what you would expect from a white, male, straight, American artist in the 1940s-- bare breasted, Hawaiian  women, young and fecund for the most part, beach scenery, or if there are men, they are at work fishing or farming.

He has several subjects that he calls "Hawaiian Chinese," studies and portraits of women of mixed Chinese and Hawaiian ancestry. I looked around for Filipinas and Latinas, both ethnic groups that I know are well represented in the Hawaiian population, but didn't find any. And of course noticeably missing were "Hawaiian Japanese." They WERE enemies, weren't they?

John Kelly, Hawaiian Chinese, ink on paper.

I love the portrait of the woman in her Chinese clothes, seated. He has put her in exactly the kind of pose and set up as a court painter would rendered an emperor or princess in the Qing Dynasty.

I guess I'm kind of interested in these pictures because I'm writing a comic novel about a middle-aged Asian American engineer trying to survive an eco-scientific-vacation on a similar kind of tropical island populated with Asian-diaspora women his age, who are all finding just how different and how alike they actually are both because of and in spite of a common ethnic ancestry.

When I look at this picture on the right, I was reminded as a lad, when looking in the mirror at my southern Chinese features that my DNA gave me, how similar a lot of my face was to several black schoolmates of mine I was in facial structure. I see a lot of my features from the cheeks on down on African Americans. In fact, my mother told me she was frequently mistaken for being black--she was very darkly complected.

I hope you enjoyed this little interlude into the work of John Kelly. I gotta get over there to the library a little more often.

Hope you have a great weekend.

Love,
Pops