Dramatic sunsets viewed from the living room of HG/BSK’s home on the Prince Edward Island oceanfront evoke many favorite painters. J.M.W. Turner, of course, with his mastery of sea, mist and sky colors. Kenneth Noland and strong horizontal bars of color. Mark Rothko and his homages to color. Also Milton Avery, Albert Pinkham Ryder and Arthur Dove with their unique images of sea shores. All of this musing about color led BSK, with BSK’s remarkable eye and background in art history, to closely examine Toby, The Wonder Dog: And, voila!! Toby’s black splashes of colors resemble Robert Motherwell’s monumental “Elegy to the Spanish Republic”. That painting and Picasso’s “Guernica”, are two of the greatest paintings of the twentieth century, fitting commentaries on the tragic events of the pivotal Spanish Civil War. “No pasaran” was the motto of the Republican Loyalists fighting the Fascists. “They shall not pass.” Unfortunately, with the aid of Hitler and Mussolini’s aircraft, the Loyalists were defeated leading to decades of General Franco’s dictatorship. With the markings of Motherwell’s painting upon him. Toby gives HG/BSK hope that the current American Fascist wave will soon recede and disappear.
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