The Story of Saturday Afternoon at The Fire

Frank Reed Larkey

"And the earth came to be ruined in the sight of the true God and the earth became filled with violence. So, God was the earth and look look! It was ruined, because all flesh had ruined its way on the earth.” Gen.6:11,12

The is one of a series of paintings created during my art courses at WLSC and my first years of marriage – 1969 to 1972. My ideas were generally influenced by Picasso, Stella, and the images from the war in Vietnam. During these early years of adulthood, I just could not understand “man’s inhumanity to man”. Thus, the question in my mind was “Why do humans practice so much violence against each other?” I drew many quick sketches in my sketch books whenever a particular troubling event occurred. My intuition, guided by my interest in cubism, was expressed in Guernica like content and images using a hard-edge, complimentary color style. 

Saturday Afternoon at the Fire - 1971

The sad irony of the historic and current human violence was that it was becoming “entertainment” and entered the homes and lives of individual humans through the public news media and film. Of course, violence as entertainment is as old as human history as captured in the ancient myths across all cultures. Still, the push/pull of human violence, while acknowledged, deserved to be questioned – in my mind, at the time. These bright complimentary colors, with hard edged featured figures and structures force the perceptual system to see movement and challenges the eyes to focus on any one particular part of the painting. The intent was to engage the viewer in a festive, circus like visual experience while the real content was of a human disaster shared by many – the burning down of their beloved home.

All this I have seen, and there was an applying of my heart to every work that had been done under the sun, during the time that man has dominated man to his injury.” Eccl. 8:9