Flashing Back

It was just past midnight on a damp June evening some 46 years ago. I was sitting on the floor with a sketchy black and white TV tuned to the California presidential primary election results. It's likely that I was working on a painting that looked something like this one.

Daisies 1969

I was 16-years-old and had been working on odds and ends of lumber, detritus from my dad's workshop that he let me have, encouraging my artwork. Some were stylized portraits of families — girls with big eyes and Victorian styled dresses holding bouquets of daisies. Others were baskets of flowers, or suns, or moons. It was the 60s, after all. I made a little money from commissions. Handmade versions, perhaps, of stick figures seen on the back of minivans these days.

On this night, however, innocence was lost once again. I looked up just in time to see a scuffle in the kitchen of a hotel. A woman, Ethyl Kennedy, reaching down for her husband Robert, as he collapsed on the ground.

What did I just see? What was real? There was no DVR to rewind. No instant replay. There was no explanation except for the chaos that surrounded the man on the ground. Sadly we'd seen it before. When would it end?

I remember the bright colors on my pallet, my brushes, my hands, the wood. I remember the black and white on the flickering TV screen.


  For more about my work follow me on Facebook or visit my website Lissa Banks Paintings.