Alphonse Lane: The Surreal Flowers And What They Represent
Artist explains
These Surreal Flowers paintings come to me from the Flower Power Movement of the 1960s, i.e., Flower Power. I still remember the Vietnam War Protest. Cars burning and people marching. The most powerful statement that came out of the Vietnam War protest was the fact that in the United States, the youth that were fighting that war rose up to the highest degree, and with such a loud voice, they put a stop to a war that they were dying because of. The youthful generation of the early to mid to late 1960s were the ones who could pay tribute to the Woodstock Festival and over 1,000,000 concertgoers in attendance in 1969. Children were born there, and young adults died of drugs at the same time. The event had performers such as the Grateful Dead, Jimmy Hendriks, Jannie Joplin, Joan Baez, and 28 others. Those names are not common among radio listeners today except for a few astute to music history. If you ask someone if they know of them and are young, They may not know what Woodstock truly represented to that generation. Woodstock and the Flower Power movement proved that Hippy Culture was a force and had come together. During those times, there were riots in Chicago, L.A., and all over the country to protest the war. I remember seeing on television a Woman with Flowers in her hair placing a white Daisy into the barrel of a rifle that a soldier of either the National Guard or the Army held. Many people don’t know or realize the song written by Neil Young, Four Dead in Ohio. It is a tribute song to the four innocent college students who were shot to death and murdered by our Government on May 4th, 1970, at Kent State University. Two twenty-year-old and two nineteen-year-old young adults were shot dead. They were protesting the war. The Ohio National Guard opened fire on the crowd, killing four and injuring nine.
I have the honor of stating that I shook the hand of the man who opened the performance at Woodstock. Richie Havens, I saw him perform at WXPN, and afterward, I waited to greet him as he came out to visit the audience and get autographed CDs and record album covers. If you are lucky, maybe you saw him and heard him sing the song Freedom.
These strange flowers that you see here are an homage to that era when drugs were rampant: LSD, mushrooms, marijuana, quaaludes, speed, and cocaine (I am not applauding drugs.) Those drugs are around today, but back then, the world was screaming about how all the crazies were doing drugs. The government was pointing the finger at the culture of the youth and drugs as the cause of the problem and calling them crazies when, realistically, it was the government itself.