Dragging Sixty Suns

From the pages of Flannery O'Connor to my canvas, this is a visual summary of her story "The Displaced Person". The title itself comes from her one and only published poem, of which there is a record of it in one of her letters, and that in the back section of her exhaustive "Collected Works" from the hardcover edition, Library of America, 1988.

Her many works and essays largely center around the early and mid-century south, of N. America, and are exposes of the then typical ignorance, prejudice, and demagoguery of those places and times, contrasting, often at great distances those qualities with their polar opposites of beauty, grace, and the "impositions" placed by the north, and "outside forces". The Displaced Person story is typical of this in it's contrast of the large, and largely unkempt, female owner of an old estate with that of...a peacock...among other things. The woman calls it "that ol' Peachick" of which she often threatens to simply turn it into stew, "comin' the next time they's a shurtage of meat 'round here" (my paraphrase of her speech).

So buy the book, then purchase my painting, and you'll have many an engrossing and entertaining time sitting and reading with it.

Stephen