Hellscape 2020: A New American Journal graphic by Walter Simon [Art Market Place]

The Big Picture – 
By Glynn Wilson –

We made it.

It may seem like a miracle.

But in the clear morning light of day on Friday, Jan. 1, 2021, the passing of the new year from 2020 to 2021 may seem a bit anti-climactic, especially if you wake up with a hang over.

The hellscape and shit storm we endured in 2020 was not the calendar’s fault. The Earth just made another elliptical orbit around the Sun.

We have Johaness Kepler to thank for our knowledge of that. He never did discover the mind of god, but he did work out the math on the laws of planetary motion.

All the hell of 2020 was not Donald Trump’s fault either. But let’s go ahead and give him credit for much of it since he did nothing to tackle the big issues or alleviate our pain.

Besides, he’s not out of the White House just yet — and COVID is still killing thousands of people around the country and the world.

Most people would probably like to forget 2020 and erase it from our collective memories, so you may not be reading the annual year in review stories being produced by newspapers and television news shows during the holidays. No one can blame anyone for that.

Related: Hellscape 2020: Year In Review in Words and Pictures

Besides, the traditional year in review story idea was developed in the era of the mass circulation daily newspaper for one reason: To provide content to fill the space around the ads in the print edition and then content to fill the time between the ads on television during the slow news period around the Christmas and New Years holidays.

Sure, it was also a chance for writers and broadcasters to take the first stab at writing history, and would later provide researchers snap shots of time to look back on and help organize their thoughts.

So the tradition continues in the Age of the Internet, and it has its utility.

It also provides an opportunity for artists, who may be able to capture a consequential period in time far better than any photographer.

Besides, in addition to all the economic and psychological suffering in 2020 on the part of musicians, athletes, writers and others who found it hard to find work during the pandemic, artists were also hard hit. If you can’t get out in public to produce and show work, what is an artist to do?

Well, some musicians took to Zoom or Facebook live to get the music out and raise money. Maybe artists should try documenting the times with oil on canvas and see if they can find patrons to support them and their work?

That’s why I asked artist Walter Simon to put on his thinking cap over the past few days, get out his brushes and paint, and try to come up with an artistic rendering of the coronavirus pandemic year, the final year of Trump’s cataclysmic presidency. It was a year of protests, but also a year of hurricanes, droughts and wildfires that should have reminded us all that climate change is real and it is here and upon us NOW!

There’s no more time to play political games with people’s lives by denying it.

What Simon came up with is an homage to a hellscape by Hieronymus Bosch, the Dutch painter of the late Middle Ages who generally painted with oil on oak wood and focused mainly on fantastic illustrations of religious concepts and narratives, especially hell.

Considering the hellish nature of the year of 2020, this seems fitting. And even if you might not want to revisit the events of 2020, perhaps you are an art lover who can appreciate the value of art to capture our times even before historians have a chance to dig into events and write the stories.

So this is an incredible opportunity to not only share in the vision of the art inspired by events and the journalism that captures them on the run on deadline. You have a chance to own a valuable piece of art and help fund the art and journalism of the future.

This is still a work in progress by the artist, and more is being added as we speak. But we are offering readers an opportunity here to get their hands on this original artwork so we are accepting offers at this time. It’s an 18 X 24 oil on canvas painting and we think it’s worth at least $1,000, maybe $1,500 or more.

We will accept bids for the original in the comments on this post, although we are looking to offer a limited edition number of prints for sale and as an incentive to reach our goal on the 2021 GoFundMe campaign too. Stay tuned for details.

You can read all about our year here, but Walter has also had a difficult year. He moved in with me in that house near Pensacola, Florida in March, just in time for the coronavirus to hit. We had planned to get him a spot in the Palafox Market in Pensacola where he could sell his art work. But of course that was canceled in mid-March due to the coronavirus pandemic.

When I high-tailed it out of Florida in April, he had to move his art around several times over the next few months and finally ended up back in his home town of Mobile, Alabama, where like many artists, writers and musicians, he is just trying to survive from day to day, hand to mouth, until we get past the pandemic and the economy opens back up again.

“As much as 2020 seemed to be a dark parody of reality, the entire Trump presidency was an apocalyptic revelation of what had been masked over by the mainstream media, revealing another mask, that of American white supremacist capitalism,” Simon said in an interview by email about his thoughts on the year and the art piece.

Hellscape 2020: A New American Journal graphic by Walter Simon [Art Market Place]

“In this painting, a tribute to the 15th century Netherlandish artist Heironymous Bosch, I have altered the characters and landscape from the original medieval hellscape where the black plague, war, destruction, and death were shown, updating the image to suit our contemporary tragedy, where a true cult of death brought the reality TV star into the White House to become the ever-tweeting, ever devouring mouth of hell, president Donald J. Trump,” he said.

“The worshipping cult in their MAGA hats run headlong into doom. Behind them the army of white robed racists, ghosts of the Confederate past brought back to life and legitimized by the president himself,” Simon added. “Mitch McConnell is represented as a turtle riding a white elephant, the symbol of the Republican party, the organization most aggressively working towards the complete destruction of the natural world.

“Coronaviruses float from the mouth of Trump into this anti-paradise, a golf course, being enjoyed by a rat, with 2020 being the Year of the Rat and Trump as king of the ratfuckers,” he emphasized.

“In the background the california wildfires blaze, and the seas surge into the city as another hurricane hits the Gulf Coast, the undeniable results of accelerating man-made climate change,” he continued. “To the left a masked nurse comforts a dying covid patient. White tear gas billows out from a police car in conflict with a huge black fist, symbolizing the Black Lives Matter movement.

“The excruciating anguish of a year of mental darkness, isolation, anxiety, and fear flows out of frame as 2020 comes to an end.”

Please Help

You can help significantly by making an offer on this painting. The artist gets half the money. Half will go to keeping the New American Journal in business for another year. It was my idea to do it, and I provided much in the way of artistic guidance for the painting.

Related: Hellscape 2020: Year In Review in Words and Pictures

We have setup a GoFundMe account to keep the press alive in a COVID world, so make your offer in the comments today.

You can make a contribution at any time to keep us alive and publishing.

Keep the Press Alive in a COVID World