I seem to have quite a few striped shirts.
Reminiscent of flags, fun, summer, 1950s beatniks, Edie Sedgwick, Jean Seberg, Andy Warhol, Pablo Picasso, Patti Smith, Debbie Harry, and anything French . . .
Following Jean Seberg’s bohemian stripes famously romanticized in Jean Luc Godard’s 1960 film, Breathless, came the idealism of the 1960s women’s liberation movement as American activism had been veering towards the personal--less about economic arguments and more about changing culture and individual consciousness to protect human dignity. This phrase became a popular buzzword.
The personal is political
The words first appeared in print as the title of a 1970 essay by the New York feminist Carol Hanisch.
A provocative notion and widely disputed idea can be twisted into variations of altered meanings . . . .
Everything is political.
Everything is personal.
The personal is just personal.
A few years ago, art critic, Jerry Saltz, wrote this…
All art is political because within every contemporary artist is the deep content of this time and all of that is in their work--even if it is just stripes or squiggles, done unoriginally, in a fever with insight.
How refreshing to step away from the sea of content, imagery, and idea to paint striations of color, line, and texture. I once made a series of such paintings.
Another view that is relatable in this political moment came from artist Paul Klee from more than a hundred years ago . . .
The more horrifying this world becomes, the more our art becomes abstract.
I would use the word horrifying to describe some aspects of what is going on now in our world that also holds so much wonder and beauty.
I remember stripe bell bottom pants that were everywhere in the late 1960s. Think they are back again—stripes never go out of style.
Another memorable stripe is the jailbird . . .
Copyright Pat Pendleton 2025. All rights reserved.
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