( image shown with watermark )

From The Uncolored Series

Year :  2026

Medium : oil on canvas

Dimensions : 109.22cm x 172.72 cm ( 43″ x 68″ )

Availability : Original  (available) available as a limited edition reproduction below

 “I love America more than any other country in the world,

and, exactly for this reason,

I insist on the right to criticize her perpetually.”

James Arthur Baldwin

Was an American writer and civil rights activist who garnered acclaim for his essays, novels, plays, and poems. His 1953 novel Go Tell It on the Mountain has been ranked by Time magazine as one of the top 100 English-language novels.

In Notes of a Native Son (1955), James Baldwin poignantly captured the nature of his intense feelings for his nation of birth in stating: “I love America more than any other country in this world, and, exactly for this reason, I insist on the right to criticize her perpetually” . The complex interaction between racial and national identity is a prominent theme throughout Baldwin’s body of work, but perhaps nowhere does the author explore this theme in more depth and nuance than in “This Morning, This Evening, So Soon,” a short story first published in The Atlantic Monthly in 1960 and later republished in the Going to Meet the Man collection (1965). “This Morning, This Evening, So Soon” probes the question of black American identity within an international context. The unnamed protagonist and narrator of this story is an African American musician who married a Swedish woman in Paris, where their biracial son grows up speaking French as his first language. For the narrator’s son, who has lived in France his entire life, America is “only a glamorous word” , but for the narrator, who grew up in Alabama, the United States is the oppressive, marginalizing country from which he had to escape in order to find the freedom to be himself. At the time of the story’s action, the protagonist has only made one return visit to America since his move to France. This visit took place when his mother died; as the boat approached New York on this journey, he saw a man showing his daughter the Statue of Liberty and reflected, “I would never know what this statue meant to others, she had always been an ugly joke for me”.