Eeeewwww … Bad Taste
I guess by now most of you are semi-familiar with Texas Republican Congressman Dan Crenshaw. The only thing you probably know is that he’s the guy with an eye patch from a war injury while he was a Navy SEAL.
You don’t know him for doing or saying anything while in congress because he doesn’t do diddle squat and says even less. He called the peaceful demonstration in front of the White House “a riot” and said it had to stop immediately. That’s all. He was overly concerned about a man’s death or even police tactics but the resulting riots were a national disgrace. He was not picked as a SEAL for his intelligence.
Anyway, the reason we’re going to take about him today is that the FEC wanted to know why Dan spent a large sum of money for “artwork” for his office.
The address listed is a Houston law firm but there’s no lawyer named “Turren” working there.
Hummmmmm….
Through the magic of modern Googleism, we were able to find artiste Kenneth Turren.
Yes, he will paint your family with Christ, and even make Christ look a little stoned.
I wanna see what Dan bought and see how he explains the check to the law firm.
If Biden touches someone’s hair it’s an assault. Jesus says: “I could assault someone on 5th Avenue and wouldn’t lose a prayer”.
1Eeuwww. (gag emoji) I’m going out to spread some compost around.
2When did the Stepford kids become a thing?
3Not long after aryan jesus, I suppose.
What an amazingly ugly painting. Everyone looks really creepy. And JC looks like he’s getting ready to squash that little girl’s head. Yeesh!
4I always love a blue eyed Jesus. Not a lot of first century Palestinians could claim that genetic mutation.
5I counted 44 heads two retired and two deceased. The last time I viewed a mob like that was watching a movie called ‘The Firm’ – a film showing a law firm run by the Mob but with far more deceased counsels.
6Ronanon, you beat me to it. (Non-Catholics might find that painting creepy but it’s nothing compared to the picture of Jesus exposing his sacred heart that hung over my bed in my youth.)
7Now you’ve gone and done it. Ben Carson will just have to have one too! It will make a nice addition to his collection of paintings of himself with Jesus.
8They all look alike – are we to presume the artist is just portraying himself as each person? Excuse me while I go wash my eyes.
9I daresay I agree with everyone who thinks it is a really ugly picture. I’d rather have a velvet Elvis any day.
10The people in that painting should’ve used the money they paid for it to get decent hairdos for the women. Juanita could fix them up, I’m sure!
11You can tell that’s a family in the painting with JC: all their mouths are exactly alike. Looking forward to Crenshaw’s version—it’ll probably show him with 2 functioning eyes.
12I’m no more in favor of burning paintings than I am of burning books, but I’ll make an exception for THAT painting, and never feel a spark of guilt!
13First mistake is Jesus wasn’t white. Would love to find the Time magazine cover from many, many years ago where they portrayed a more realistic depiction of Jesus as what He was, a Arabic looking Jew.
14Take $2.75 off that billing and it would be $2666…
.
Like others have mentioned, that is one waaay crappy picture. Artistically abominable.
As an amateur artist [for ~60+ years], with some actual art training, imo, that picture is beyond pathetic. A barely talented teen artist could do better by far.
The rendering of clothes and hair is tolerable, but the composition, subject placement, fall of light, shadowing, coloration, capture of subjects, is just woefully subpar; far more so for a supposed paid ‘pro’.
Yeah, JC looks like he’s flying celestial on medical marijuana [or Quaaludes], totally spaced out; hell, they all do. JC, our first Chief of the US Space Force?
15Not going to get into the ‘Aryan’ thing, they appear to be an actual family grouping. Although similar actual German [and Axis] domestic propaganda illustrations of the period were quite good in comparison.
Y’know, looking at paintings like this makes me realize Savanarola might have had a point….
16Harry Edgar @ 7,
In my youth I was forced to attend Catholic church. I was never baptized Catholic. The thing that horrified me was the immaculate conception. In my 12-year-old mind, I couldn’t accept the church dogma and thought God was having sex with Mary. When I got old enough, I refused to attend church and refused to believe in the Christian faith.
It’s still a free country and everyone has a right to practice a faith as they wish or not.
17Was that actually a paint by number “work of art”?
18Just askin’ , , ,
@ Grandma Ada – those are guaranteed pentecostal hairdos, I’ll have you know..(no, really)..only wimmen wearing long skirts and that hairstyle will get into heaven…
19For Pentecostal hair, google Kim Davis (the Ky county clerk who refused to marry gays) – lotsa those at my WalMart every day…
20Leave the *artiste* alone!
21According to his website, his art has been purchased by the First State Bank of Kilgore.
If that ain’t legit, nothing is!
AK Lynne:
22I just wonder if this guy has gotten around to reimagining da Vinci’s The Last Supper with poker playing dogs?
The ’80’s called….they’d like their hair back. Please, Juanita Jean, do SOMEthing for this poor family!
As for the blue-eyed Jesus, I get a giggle every Sunday morning about the chubby, blonde baby Jesus over the altar…I much prefer the sad-eyed Spanish Mary and baby Jesus next to the sacristy.
23SteveTheReturned: Yes they all look alike which begs the question, were the parents related other than by marriage.
24Anyone got a wood chipper they’re not using? Asking for an artist friend…
25I’ll borrow a statement made by Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart, and paraphrase as:
I shall not today attempt further to define art… But I know it when I see it, and the painting involved in this case is not that.
I would say the painting is obscene however.
26Is it just me, or is the painting shown here not of a real family? I swear that’s Bobby and Cindy Brady in there, along with children from Little House on the Prairie, possibly the Waltons and other shows?
27Children of the corn.
This guy makes that McNaughton nutball look talented. Well, almost.
28I’ll bet Jeffrey Epstein had one just like it on his wall.
29The “artist” last name is Turner. He is a Mormon, which explains a lot to me. I found this link when looking for John and Mary Ann Evans, the owners of this monstrosity.
http://kennethturnerart.com/lds.html
Yikes.
30JC’s eyes… he looks a bit deranged in that picture.
31It’s so weird to see all the subjects in the picture looking in different directions. And none of them are actually facing Jesus, although one or two are checking him out from the corner of their eye. It’s their god in their midst, but hey, let’s all just look in random directions.
32That’s just creepy. Any decent portraitist would be ashamed.
33(Full disclosure, I’m an average portraitist.)
Sweet Baby Jesus, that is one ugly pitcher (yeah, wrong spellin’) maybe your one eyed political hack has trouble appreciating “ art” cause of his disability. There ain’t nothin good about this mess. Gimme Elvis on velvet anytime!
34Well, I thought Trump groping his daughter was creepy and it was, but this is not just creepy but delusional creepy. At least Trump really wanted to grope his daughter.
35As a contrarian Christian, I’m bound to argify a little here. We do not know what Jesus looked like. We do not know what Jewish persons of his time looked like. We do not know what the ancestors of this supposedly inbred people looked like. In that part of the Near East, invading troops had marched in repeatedly from different areas (Babylon which was NOT Arab, Greek & Macedonians who included (thanks to Alexander’s other conquests) soldiers and camp followers from the Balkans to the Caucasus and possibly as far as India, more Egyptians (traders), Romans and their variegated armies including people from middle and northern Europe–even Britain. What we now consider Arabs were largely wild tribesmen at that time…and they visited too, but they were not the dominant influence. We know NOTHING about his skin color, eye color, hair color, actual height. We know nothing about whether his mother’s details,either, *or her exact parentage and their background.*
Besides which, if you consider the “historical Jesus” important (which only Christians do, right?) then on the other side of his ancestroy he could claim to be EVERYBODY’s son, as he was EVERYBODY’s savior. It makes sense to me to let everyone imagine Jesus as like themselves…to have representations of black Jesus, brown (in multiiple shades and bone structure) Jesuses, pale Jesuses, ruddy Jesuses, Jesuses with straight or curly hair of any color, and with any eye color. (Yes, Virginia some very dark skinned people have naturally blue or green eyes.) So I really think (though that IS to me an ugly painting) all this snarking about the details…is uncalled for.
36I would only add to Elizabeth Moon’s comment about Jesus’s appearance that his Father was invisible, which I think we can agree is even whiter than white. So who knows what he looked like?
(Sorry Elizabeth, sometimes I can’t help myself. I agree with your assertion that there was already a great deal of travel throughout the Mediterranean area two thousand years ago, so we cant really know)
37Elizabeth Moon @36 & Rick @37, There are probably many contemporary Roman accounts and descriptions of the inhabitants of that region. Y’all can do the research there, I tend to despise anything Middle Eastern.
Wherever they went, the Roman legions and civil administrations performed very detailed analysis and studies of their many conquests and cultural encounters. Lots of those accounts survive. The only ones I’ve looked at much are their British, Irish, and German/Scandinavian reports, which are most interesting.
38As in Galilee, Britain et al., if the Roman subjects cooperated and tended to be relatively peaceful, their Roman overlords would allow a surprising amount of freedoms and self-government to the populace. Until there might be some unrest, then the Romans got rough until things quieted down.
The Romans never could get anywhere with those crazy fierce Picts/Scots, finally just trying to wall them off– the Hadrian and Antonine Walls.
Elizabeth Moon:
39The following is my perspective only. I DO NOT SPEAK FOR ANYONE ELSE. I agree with your assertion that every group has the right to envision the Son of God in their own image. And you’ve pointed out spectacularly why that’s valid.
But for me, the issue is in the context of the larger picture.
It’s all about white privilege. Non-whites have been second class citizens for the entirety of our democracy. And it’s so easy for we white folks to forget that. So when we point out the perceived superiority of our race in the depictions of Jesus, we’re drawing attention to that. And even though anybody can depict him in their likeness, how much will it be seen? But that’s just my opinion and I’m just as full of shit as anybody else.
Having said that, thank you for your perspective. The conversation is everything.
Larry from Colorado: Time had multiple covers with images representing Jesus. Is this the one you were thinking of? It’s from Apr. 8, 1996.
https://time.com/3637889/historical-jesus-history/
40Anyone else ever consider that the DAD is playing JESUS in this piece?
Seems possible since it’s a totally non-representative piece schlocky crap.
41I wonder how “Kenneth Turner” got transmuted to “Kenneth Turren” – well, that’s easy: just reverse the letters ‘ner’ – but was it an intentional misspelling?
Is Dan trying to hide something with the law firm’s assistance? That would seem to be unnecessary – after all, a member of Congress probably gets some allowance to decorate his or her office. Maybe he’s just trying to cover up his hideous taste in art, which would be on full display to any and everyone who sets foot in his office.
42Not forgetting that Jesus was Olive skinned NOT White .
43And the artist needs to explain why Jesus is not blonde enough.
44With those eyes…..
Since the evidence that Jesus existed is nil, it is silly to debate what he looked like.
45Larry from Colorado: yup, I remembered that “what did the guy really look like” article. And I remembered it was not in the first magazine that you would expect:
https://www.popularmechanics.com/science/health/a234/1282186/
Elizabeth Moon, you’re certainly right about the extreme mixing that went on in the Levant. But the Popular Mechanics article is based in part on actual dead bodies dug up from around the right time (30s CE) and place. Not that it matters WTH he looked like.
In that “painting”, what really is striking is little Timmy in the bottom right. I’m sure that Lassie would have carried him back and dumped him in the well after seeing that rendition.
46Never mind that Jesus was from the Middle East and in the photo looks like a Swede.
47