The ART of Storytelling
hello my name is alan boatright
i am an artist i go by the name alan j
on my paintings i simply sign with a
letter a
because i feel like the paintings aren’t
really about me they’re more about
the subject so with that said uh when i
was
young eight years old i started painting
i started painting with
oil pastels colored pencils and i kept
doing it all my life
i never had a job that wasn’t art
related except for mowing lawns and pick
and night crawlers
outside of that it’s all been art
related although i never sold
any art as an artist until i was 56
years old
i started we bought a house here in
florida next to my in-law so we could
take care of them in their
latter years and i wanted to decorate it
with beachy stuff but i didn’t
want palm trees
i didn’t want pelicans flying i wanted
something really strange so i
decided that what i would do is paint
them myself so i started painting robots
lounging on the beach rusting
and it took off from there people always
ask me
why i paint robots and the answer to me
is kind of simple if i paint a robot
you can’t tell me if this is a boy or a
girl if he’s a republican a democrat
if he you can’t tell me anything about
him
what his race is anything so it removes
your ability to prejudge what might be
happening here
and most times it’s always robots in
this case there’s
some humans in here and i’ll tell you
why i chose those in just a minute
but i also number my paintings you’ll
notice there’s numbers on the paintings
and people ask me about that too almost
every show they’re like what’s with the
numbers well
the numbers at first were to help me
keep track of the order i did them in
because while i can remember really
stupid minutia
i can’t remember what painting number 52
was and i might have done it three weeks
ago
so but i can tell you the order i did
them in
one two three four five six seven all
the way up to 57.
so this one is painting number 42 and
sometimes that number plays a
intricate role in the painting but i
don’t
like my next painting is number 57 and i
don’t have a plan oh number
57 that’s 57 chevy they were mainly
turquoise and white in my mind so i’ll
paint a 57 chevy
doesn’t work that way i i tend to um
just roll with it and then it’s almost
like
it just flows out of me and it either
matches a number or it doesn’t but i
never let the number decide
so in this case i was going to paint uh
about the moon men not being the first
men on the moon we got buzz aldrin neil
armstrong
it’s apollo 11 mission
and uh 42nd painting and it starts out
as a series of jokes about
not being the first and there’s no
american icon about being the first any
more
important or memorable than when we
stood on the moon
nobody had stood on the moon and so
that’s a very big first so i spoofed
that
to get to the real point of this
painting and so
my paintings i tend to let the viewer
look at it
get it all wrong and then i like to go
in and clean it up
for them and i purposely put things in
there to distract them like cadillac
the cadillac emblem the real rivets the
real timex watch just to
take them totally out of the game of
really knowing what’s going on
so in this case
neil armstrong neil armstrong buzz
aldrin arrive
on the moon first men on the moon but
they find
that the robots have beat them to it and
they’ve taken a sample
well the robots arrived on the moon
moments earlier thinking they were the
first on the moon
and they found that these little green
men had arrived before them
and if you look here he’s got a sample
so then if you look at the footprints
where they’re standing you’ve got a lot
of footprints here
there’s here’s one that’s way bigger
than his foot
and here’s a faded one a little bit
older way bigger than this foot
and in the background this possibly is a
footprint
way bigger than all the feet so if
you’ve got buzz aldrin and his stick
reflected right here
in this part of the helmet who’s this
so they’re about to get sampled and
that’s where
the joke lies but the real story
lies in this number 42 in this logo
brooklyn dodgers
everybody knows that jackie robinson was
the first colored player
in major league baseball he broke what
they called the color line
and paved the way for uh black americans
to play baseball just like anybody else
but actually he wasn’t the first
if you go and take 42 and 42 and add
them together
this is just a way that i remember
things that equals 84.
in 1884 which was 63 years
before jackie robinson there was a guy
by the name of moses fleetwood walker
and now you know why i have the
fleetwood emblem there
he played 42 games in the major leagues
coincidentally
he batted 236 he caught without a glove
he was a catcher
he didn’t wear the breastplate either
he often took hits broke ribs broke
orbital bones but he hung in there and
he was tough
he um ended up playing just those 42
games and the problem was that up in the
audience were
slave owners it’s 1884 and they’re
looking out there going
what’s this guy doing well he’s batting
- he’s doing great
um he’s catching without a glove
it’s great what’s he doing out there and
there was such confusion and
insults being hurled from the crowd and
that
the next year since he’s all broken up
and
not doing so well he’s he’s playing well
but
he’s a distraction so they say don’t
come back next year
now i made two thousand dollars that
year in 1884 that was a lot of money
but that was the end of moses fleetwood
walker
his baseball career so now let’s
talk about another person i’ve got
two astronauts i’ve got two robots i’ve
got two
army men so we can’t really just stop
with two
or one human we got to do one more so
let’s do rosa parks
on december 1st 1955
rosa parks was 42 years old
she sat down on a bus in montgomery
alabama
it was a segregated bus and she sat in
the front row of the colored section
when she uh
sat down there was one seat beside her
and then the
two seats across the aisle were taken
also by
people of color and it was raining and
three white people got on the bus and
the bus driver got up and he said you
three you’re going to have to move back
and he moved the sign the colored people
section sign he moved
it back and the other two people
complied got up and stood
but she says i’m not getting up and this
was the same bus driver that weeks
earlier
she had gotten on the front of the bus
because that’s where you paid she got on
and paid and then she looked and if
there’s any white people sitting in the
white section
you as a person of color are not allowed
to walk
back that way you got to get off the bus
go to the back door and come in the back
door
so she paid looked and he goes you got
to get back off
get in the back and so she stepped off
the bus he closed the door and drove off
left her standing in the rain
now the same bus driver has moved the
sign behind her
and has said move she refused she was
arrested
that started the montgomery bus strike
which then started the
freedom movement and she’s credited with
being the first to do so
but she wasn’t the first eleven years
earlier
it’s 1944.
we’re back to jackie robinson the
japanese had
bombed pearl harbor on december 7th 1941
and on january 6
1942 jackie robinson was drafted
into the army now
he was a educated uh person of color and
he was
able to with a little bit of a fight
took about two years
he became an officer he was a second
lieutenant
in the army at fort hood
in 1944 he got on a bus after
a doctor’s appointment for a uh ankle he
had
uh problems from sports in college with
his ankle
and he had it looked at and he got on
the bus and
he now this was a segregated bus
black and white could ride together
anywhere they wanted it was on a
military base
and the government was not they did not
have
unsegregated buses so he was able to sit
wherever he wanted
but a guy got on the bus and the bus
driver says you got to move to the back
and he’s he looked around and he thought
i got corporals privates sergeants
these are people i’m going to be leading
in battle when i get over to europe in a
few weeks
i’m on the head of a a tank outfit the
black panthers it happened to be
and um i’m going to lead them into
battle and i’m going to say come on and
they’re all
going to magically know now that they
can do what i say
but here in america right now this day
i have to go to the back of the bus like
a second class citizen
so he says i’m not going to do it
so the bus driver gave up drove on to
the end of the line
and when they got to the end of the line
he summoned the military police over and
they arrested jackie robinson
he went on trial for insubordination
he uh with the help of friends fellow
officers the naacp
he ended up getting all charges against
him dropped he was acquitted by a
all-white jury of nine men
and they dropped the charges but he was
out of the army he got an honorable
discharge and he was released from the
army
so now it’s november 1944 the war is
almost over and
within a few weeks it was over and
he couldn’t find work because everybody
came home and they’re all taking the
jobs
the last person is going to get a job is
a black man that raised a ruckus in the
army
so he decided to take
the advice of a friend and he went on to
try out for baseball
he made the team with the brooklyn
dodgers
he went on to play many many games for
him he became the highest paid player
in baseball history when he retired in
1961 he was nominated for the hall of
fame at the age of 42.
in 1962 he was actually inducted into
the hall of fame
in 1972 number 42 was retired from the
brooklyn dodgers
in 1997 the number 42 was retired
throughout all of baseball
so the next time you hear someone say
this is the first time this has happened
just know that it isn’t
the first even the bible says there’s
nothing new under the sun
in ecclesiastes 119
1-9 excuse me and
for more information on the paintings go
to iron ironplanetstudios.com
and read all you want