“Milk”, approx. 18″x12″, paintmarker and acrylic on cheap prefab stretched canvas

In honor of KASEY’s excellent recent series on art and queer culture, I decided to share another painting of mine loosely related to a similar subject. This portrait of Harvey Milk was done from a photograph taken of him while he was campaigning for election in San Francisco. It was done as another surprise birthday gift in dimensions allowable to be stored in carry-on luggage when I flew home recently. It seems like most of my art ends up given as gifts, does that mean I’m a cheapskate when it comes to gift-giving?

In any case, it’s hard for me to capture faces on this smaller scale, so I don’t feel I did the subject justice in the translation from photo to paint. The main impetus was to represent an extremely brave and admirable public figure of queer culture as a gift to an openly homosexual family member who I greatly admire and is similarly extremely brave.

The text repeated in the background and mostly obscured by Harvey’s smiling face reads: “none so brave as those unafraid to love”

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