I generally begin by saying I don't paint saints. Dorothy Day always said she didn't want to be called a saint because it demeaned the difficulty of her struggles to do the better thing. I paint flawed human beings. And that's the good news because then each of us can also do a courageous thing or two which lifts us out of the mire of our flaws. And that lift doesn't negate the flaws, it shows how complex we are.
If we judge the messenger by every quirk or flaw in her/his life, we would never hear the message. If all that is important to us is that MLK,Jr., cheated on his wife, we've missed the message that can change all our lives & help create a just society.
Many of the people I've painted are products of the culture of their time. The remarkable thing is not they couldn't break free from all of the nasty, privileged or prejudicial chains of the culture, but that they broke free from some. And what happened then was that they nudged our history in a different & better direction in some big or little way. They gave us permission to think differently.
We look too often at the lives of others with the unfortunate impulse to judge. Judging can be important because it helps us plot our own ethical course. But it needs to be done with humility. For instance, we may harshly judge the southern slave holder. And we should judge the absolute evil of the slave trade & all that followed from it. But white folks should be very wary of saying that if they had been alive in the South then, they would surely have worked for the underground railroad. Perhaps. The very scary thing is we don't know how we would have responded to family, economic and peer pressure. If Thomas Jefferson could not live up to his own words, which of us can say we would have. Because Jefferson was a hypocrite, are his words any less true?
Think of the gruesome murder of George Floyd. It would never occur to us to question the rightness and rage of the mass movement in response by saying, well, each of those people who marched for days in the streets was not a perfect person so their message is inauthentic. Of course, some of them had done racist or dishonest things in their past. The good thing, the persistent thing, the courageous thing is then our redemption & the way we move the culture.
It's been argued that Frederick Douglass may be the greatest of all Americans. I don't like singling out any one person like that, but the scale of his impact, the trajectory & courage of his life is unmatched. In some of his speeches he used racism against the Irish and Native people to raise the estimation of Blacks. Is he better or worse than John Muir?
And then what do we do with John Brown? Frederick Douglass called Brown far superior to himself because he was willing to die to free the slaves not just talk for them.
Better angels are all the more inspiring for being imperfect. I would give up everything I've done, to accompany Muir on one of his epic walks through vast wilderness. I've never risked myself like that. Maybe some indigenous people would feed us when we were hungry.
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– Robert Shetterly
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