And more political portraiture

I have continued with the portraiture. I commission which I won't publish yet, and a couple of others: Huey Newton and Emma Goldman. Emma Goldman was an interesting woman. She left Russia (actually now Lithuania) as a teenager in 1885. Many Jews did at that time, including my great grandparents, escaping anti-Semitism. It wasn't a safe place to be a Jew at the time. She ended up in America and became a famous anarchist and activist, fighting for the rights of women, and the rights of workers. She was jailed numerous times in the US and was eventually exiled to Russia in 1917, where she for a while embraced the revolution, but ultimately condemned the bolshevik state for its dictatorship of the proletariat, as other anarchists did.

Emma Goldman
Oil on Canvas 35x24cm

Huey Newton was one of the founders of the Black Panthers in the 1960s in the USA, alongside Bobby Seale. Despite getting regularly into trouble as a teenager, Newton was extremely well-read, intelligent and qualified. There is so much written about his life and about the Black Panthers I can't hope to put anything useful in writing here. It's impossible to write about everything Newton and Goldman did and said, but it's worth anyone's time doing the research. Both advocated the use of violence on occasion to attempt to achieve their aims. Given the oppression of black people, of women, of discrimination and of persecution that they both suffered, it is not a surprise, nor easy to condemn.

Jeez this is possibly the most illiterate entry I've ever written on this blog! Just look at the pictures and forgive my inadequacies...

Huey P Newton
Oil on canvas 60x60cm