The next morning I eat breakfast at a diner, and start to walk down to Sun Studio, where Elvis Presley recorded his first two gold records. As I walk the same streets of Memphis that Elvis walked, it is easy to understand why so many fans report that Elvis is as alive as ever. His presence is simply too powerful to fade.

Throughout these visits to Memphis and in the paintings I’m making, I literally feel that Elvis is walking with me, taking me down the side streets down Monroe Street. He shows me the old Wonder Bread Bakery, and Walker’s Radiator Works, and tells me stories as we stop and watch the trolleys pass Orleans Station. At 706 Union Ave. we come to the door of a very modest little building. This little storefront is the legendary Sun Studio, the original office of the “Memphis Recording Service.”

Elvis tells me that he first entered this door in 1953, a nervous unknown teenager with a cheap guitar. I walk over and grab hold of the doorknob to the office. Its staggering history pulses through me.

Other members of the Million Dollar Quartet, Jerry Lee Lewis, Carl Perkins, and Johnny Cash also touched this doorknob. Roy Orbison, Charlie Rich, BB King, Little Milton, Junior Parker, Rufus Thomas, Howlin, Wolf, all held this same doorknob, opened it, and entered History by recording many of the most iconic tracks of their era in the small recording studio inside. Inspired record producer Sam Phillips, opened Sun Studio in 1950. With his patient ear he created a nurturing environment for the artists to come in and work their magic. After Jackie Brenston and Ike Turner recorded Rocket 88 at Sun in 1951, Sun Studio was widely acclaimed as the birthplace of Rock and Roll.

In an era when most big-city recording dates were run military-style, typically four cuts in three hours. The clock did not bind Phillips. He owned the studio and the label. And would roll tape until he caught magic.

Country, Blues and Rockabilly stars also recorded there. The list of names is shocking. Little Milton, Junior Parker, Howlin’ Wolf, Rufus Thomas, B.B. King, James Cotton and Rosco Gordon all recorded there in the early 1950s. Others like Johnny Cash, Elvis Presley, Carl Perkins, Roy Orbison, Charlie Feathers, Ray Harris, Warren Smith, Charlie Rich, and Jerry Lee Lewis, signed to the Sun Records label and recorded there throughout the latter 1950s.

I had to get back to Graceland for a meeting so I bid them all farewell, and called a cab from the gas station.’

I love Memphis but the cab ride is cold, and I’m headed for a two-star hotel downtown, so I keep my fingers crossed. I’m back in town to do an exhibit at Graceland Mansion, another at Jay Etkin Gallery downtown, and a second Sirius Satellite Radio interview.

The lobby is low frills. It has the feel of an airport rental-car counter. A uniformed valet sleeps in an armchair near the door, pretending to read a magazine that now flops on his knee. Across the courtyard I notice a rib joint all glassed in with big windows all steamy and inviting looking. Is it just a mirage? The vision of a real Memphis Bar-b-que joint, right in the carport of my hotel really looks too good to be true.

I give the menu board a dazed stare, when a pretty little hostess touches my arm and says something that ends with “Baby.” My mind trips a switch and I’m back in the years I lived in New Orleans. I miss these simple little southern kindnesses, so rarely heard in the northern cities, These Baby, Darlin things. “Pardon Me?”

“What can i get for you, Sugar?” she smiles, pulling my mind back into the room. In the City of Broad Shoulders, they don’t play it that way. You’re more likely to get the thousand-yard stare, which is supposed to mean something like, “what do you need, hurry up, there’s a bunch of other people behind you, and you’re workin my nerves”. But this is Memphis now. And certain social graces apply. Of all the things I miss about living in the South, these social graces and this “What can I get you Baby-Darlin-Sugar” stuff is right up there near the top of the list. I miss that a lot.

“I just want some ribs or a sandwich or something, what’s really good tonight?” “Well the ribs are always good” she replies in the same melodious drawl. The aroma in the place testifies mightily to her claim about the ribs, and I needed no further persuasion there, but I venture further. “What kind of sandwich is good?” “Try the pork shoulder sandwich, you’re gonna like it.” I liked the sound of her confidence in that sandwich, so I order it with the slaw on the side and sit down in a booth to watch the goings on.

A pack of young cops in two booths toward the back finish their meals and horse around with the owner, putting each other in headlocks and shit. Across the room a panhandler chats with a man in a wheelchair, while a guy that looks to be a deliveryman sorts through order tickets and brown paper bags, stacking them in rows. Another group jokes with a waitress? they seem to know. It’s kind of hard to tell exactly who works here, and who is just hanging out. But that seems to be part of the charm of the place.

Most just seem to be happy to be warm and inside. And the rich aroma of down home Bar-B-Que in the place is heavenly.

I look back toward the hotel lobby across a cold empty swimming pool. Scattered leaves and a old lawn chair line the bottom of the empty pool, and add a nice touch to the broke-down atmosphere of the old hotel.

But back inside the rib joint is full of life. The Chefs jostle and joke and hammer away at the pots and pans. Everyone seems to be buzzing off the action of the kitchen and jamming to a crackly jukebox. Most seem to know each other and are in no rush to go anywhere at all. Besides, the temperature was like 20 degrees outside. Who needs to rush out into that? We have everything we could possibly want right here in the rib joint.

The edges of black vinyl-letters spelling out “R Ribs” curl away from the moist plate glass. The place is bereft of conventional charm, but leftover bits of decoration still work their half-hearted magic. Fragments of glitter and ribbon, from happy parties long past, do their best to bring us cheer. And a half-tattered Santa flutters gaily under a heating duct. It kind of worked.

Lost in my daydream, I don’t hear my order being called. But someone waves at me, and I snatch it up with a quick nod and make the journey back across the carport. Past the vacant swimming pool, a few lonely coke machines, and up to my 9th floor room.

The Bar-B-Que is heavenly. I flip open the City Magazine on the desk of the room. This one is called “Memphis Downtowner” and right away I see a photo of one of my paintings in there, and an article about the show at Jay Etkin Gallery, which opens tomorrow night! I’m starting to feel at home here in Memphis!

The Sirius Radio interview is a blast. A good-vibe DJ named Argo, interviews me and even lets me cue up and play a couple of Elvis songs on the broadcast. My licensing agent Steve Scebelo is in there, along with Media Assistant Alicia Dean and Archivist Robert Dye Jr. both from (EPE) Elvis Presley Enterprises. We clown around in the studio, and Dye’s camera is flashing. Robert Dye Jr. is a historian and archivist for Elvis Presley Enterprises. He’s one of these people with a dream job. Photography Manager for the Elvis Presley Archive, basically the gatekeeper to images of the most photographed man in history.

Dye is an amazing photographer in his own right. His father, Robert Dye Sr. was one of the very first professional photographers to ever take pictures of Elvis. These very, very early photos of Elvis are riveting to look at. They show candid, unscripted backstage photos of Elvis flashing that million dollar smile taken so early on in Elvis’ career, you can still see the rough-around-the-edges Elvis posing and flashing his bad-boy sneer. There is freshness in the Robert Dye Sr. photos that can’t be beat. You can even still see the rough rope-knots that Elvis has on a makeshift guitar strap. They show a fresh-faced Elvis right out of High School, before the money came. At the time Elvis is playing local fairs and nightclubs. The Dye photos foretell big things to come for Elvis.

The interview breaks up and we walk back across the street toward Graceland and the EPE offices to have some meetings and look through a set of images of Elvis taken during the years he played Las Vegas. Robert also shows me a whole set of thumbnails of the Gold Lame Outfit. These are very cool. We look at a ton of photos and have a couple more meetings and then people are starting to fade from hunger so we hop into someone’s SUV to go get some dinner with Iris Houston, the Licensing manager at Elvis Presley Enterprises. Iris takes us to dinner at Pearl’ Oyster House. A very tasty spot just a block or so from the Jay Etkin Gallery. The lunch was awesome. Iris Houston has a quiet and quick sense of humor. One of those people whose wit kind of sneaks up on you, till all of a sudden you’re laughing till your stomach hurts.

From Pearl’s Oyster House, we walk the couple blocks over to Jay Etkin Gallery, and see that Jay has done a beautiful job of installing the show. Jay Etkin is a tall distinguished looking guy with a lot of cool Memphis stories. He’s more or less the Mayor of the this ultra-hip neighborhood that grew up around his gallery at 409 S Main St. The gallery itself is a huge vintage loft and really looks like a movie set. In fact it was the set of a Hollywood movie, (I forget which one), but Jay Etkin himself is really fun and down-to-earth and his beautiful gallery is surrounded by some very good restaurants and very hip night spots. The opening is a smashing success, Jay seems to know everyone in town, and the crowds just keep pouring in.

Around 10 o’clock, Steve, Robert Dye Jr., and I head out to catch a late night dinner at another restaurant just north of the Gallery, and are lucky to score a table in the jam-packed place. We just kick back, have a few beers, some delicious seafood, talk about Memphis history, and are soon ready to hit the pillows back at the hotel. Steve and I both have 6am flights so we will be weary travelers. Memphis is just plain cool. I can’t wait to come back here.

Sometimes living in a big city affords an artist a front-row seat to history. Whatever City, whatever Gotham you chose, you can bet when Batman comes out of his Cave, he’s sure as hell not tooling out into the countryside to go catfishing under a shade tree. No. When Batman comes out, he is screaming wheels to downtown Gotham, because that’s where the action is. We witnessed such an event recently when hundreds of thousands of people from surrounding states began streaming into Chicago for election night.

Being a Chicago-based artist and watching the Obama story first-hand, motivated me to paint about it. Seeing his motorcade in downtown Chicago is something right out of a Batman movie – a large caravan of black suvs. If you see them in traffic, you do not cut into the line. Never mind the jimmyloads of marine-types gesturing with automatic weapons, its just bad manners to cut the man off. He’s the President. You don’t need to be cutting him off in traffic.

The Obamas live in Hyde Park, a beautiful part of the city on the south lakeshore. Everyone here in Chicago has an Obama story. They know Michelle’s hairdresser, they see Barack at the gym. And it’s pretty fun to watch our local TV news. Here is a typical news story: The little boy who lives across the street from the new President has his own book out in bookstores. It is a picture book full of photos and drawings that he made over the past couple years in his interactions with Mr. Obama, starting from the first day when Mr. Obama kindly introduced himself in the drive-way. And then he watches the Obama house go from just another house on the block, all the way up to having 24-hour security, concrete barricades, and special FBI agents dressed like Ninjas walking across the rooftops.

So Sandra and I can not resist going to Grant Park on election night when it was still very much unknown if Obama would even win.

It is a beautiful warm evening. The crowd in Grant Park is giant. This is the exact same park where some of the wildest riots of the 1960s occurred, but now just might be a very different moment in history. When we first arrive, it feels safe, but if he loses the election, nobody knows exactly what to expect. Maybe there will be riots. Maybe not, maybe people will just go home sad and aimless. Either way, there is a lot on the line. So the mood is hopeful but at the same time, who knows? I would describe it as a strange mix of jubilance with a nervous and possibly dangerous undertow. As each state result shows on the CNN jumbotrons, the crowd cheers wildly. Or groans if the state goes Red. The racial mix of the crowd is beautiful and watching the faces of so many disenfranchised people realizing that they soon could “own” a very real piece of America, is incredible.

The crowd is loud and happy. It’s very hard to hear the sound portion of the TV broadcast, and kind of like watching a show with the sound muted, and being on the show all at the same time. But finally there is a moment when the CNN screens repeatedly flash “Barack Obama declared President” and the crowd goes absolutely crazy and everyone is just dancing and jumping up and down. Some stand perfectly still and open-mouthed, looking at each other in some kind of suspended reality, unsure that something this cool could have actually happened. The vibe is intense.

Okay, so he’s President. It sinks in slowly that now Obama is actually going to come out and talk and what might just as easily have been a concession speech, is now going to be a victory speech. Waiting for him to come out on stage is literally like waiting for Led Zeppelin to skip out and crank on the amps. We see John McCain give a concession speech, but the crowd wants Barack. The mood is anxious and jubilant. It appears the organizers have pre-arranged some kind of soft, soothing muzac designed to keep everything calm, but the crowd isn’t having it. They chant, bounce, dance, and cry. Finally out comes the new first family. And a whole new shift happens. Its like someone turns a knob up on the crowd. They seemed loud before but now they REALLY roar to life. Barack is talking but I don’t remember hearing too much, people are just waving, jumping up and down and screaming. CNN jumbotrons flash pictures of the giant crowd filling Grant Park, beaming our image around the world. And for that one night we were the center of the universe.

Over the summer I’d worked for several months on getting this portrait just right. To me, the feeling of the country for many years is much like it was during the late 1960s. A fractured nervous time, very difficult for all, no matter which side of the fence you were on. The U.S. hasn’t seen a public figure like this since JFK or MLK, and now Obama is the Man of the Hour.

I felt challenged as an artist to try to capture the feeling of this time… to try to communicate in a single image what it feels like. I used Obama’s own words to title the portrait ‘Audacity’ because he is an audacious figure; representing the America we hoped we could be some day.

au-dac-i-ty
Pronunciation [aw-das-i-tee]

1. boldness or daring, esp. with confident or arrogant disregard for personal safety, conventional thought, or other restrictions.

Earlier this spring as Sandra and i were coming back from the Soho show in New York, we had to change planes in DC. We’re standing in the jet way waiting in line, and we turn around see Jesse Jackson Sr walking toward us and he takes his place in line right behind us. He beams a big smile, we introduce ourselves and clown around with him a little bit and he is very nice to us. By coincidence his son Jesse Jr is a client of The Gallery and collects the work of Mark Huddle, an extraordinary urban landscape painter. So after the portrait was finished we asked Jesse Jackson Jr if he would like to present the Obama portrait to the President. And we hope they find some nice wall space for it, because it is a project to remember.