The Great Lupo Sol in Nowhere Spain

Serious Men Stupid Conversations 2023. Oil on canvas, 25 x 21"

Lupo Sol is not his real name. He signs his paintings “Sol” which gave me the idea to sign mine “PoH” for over six years. Before then, I was always looking for that easy signature. I write messily, upside-down left-handed. “PoH” is “Ron” in Cyrillic. Three letters, indecipherable west of St. Petersburg, would be easier to paint than a shaky “Ronald Throop” smeared onto the canvas without confidence. Besides the fact that he is tiers above me in visual art making, I have learned this from Lupo Sol: Three letters is good enough for Stuckism.

Lupo makes me want to leave art for good, get some land and become a corn farmer. I am an imposter. He is a world champion of painting. Stuckism doesn’t deserve him, but it certainly suits his misfortune. Here is one of the greatest living painters on earth, having to beg for dollars on social media and garage sale arts and crafts websites like Etsy. His own countrymen have forsaken him. I’ve been to Spain with its history and relics. Good food is plentiful, and the wildlife woefully underrepresented. They killed off the wild ones, including their artists. Spain likes jet skies, and despises creative expression. Or, if some pretend to like art enough to invest in it, they just relish the taste of the worst trash in America.

In 2017, I sponsored an exhibition for him in Hamilton, N.Y. The gallery owner had eyeballs and half a brain, so she said yes, please hang his paper paintings on my white walls of country boredom. She and I did more for Lupo Sol than the nation of Spain. It is an honor and a travesty to be one of only three public exhibitions listed on his website.

I guess one can look at Lupo Sol’s fate in a positive light. Art, via the Internet, is killing off nationalism. Which is a very good thing. He has thousands of adoring fans on Instagram and beyond. His art gets sold. He handles and ships paintings all over the world, while successfully branding his art business which has made him the grim reaper of Stuckism. He stands out alone as cause for addendum statement #21:

“After Stuckism, become a lone wolf”.

I wrote a promotional song for his exhibition. It’s a catchy tune.

And another video to shake up some interest:

Finally, the exhibition. Happily, I’m less nervous about public speaking these days:

Words from Lupo at the time of his 2017 exhibition:

I paint things of life and images of my memories, which show as if taken from a camera in my brain. If the scene is tragicomic, then it’s from pure imitation of life.

Grotesque characters are my predilection. The human figure almost always deformed, is the habitual victim of my sarcasm, shocking scenes and paradoxical situations.

For me, art is love and rage, pleasure and shouting. My objective is to record the tragicomedy that you see, that you may enjoy or suffer from it.

I urge you to go to his website to see for yourself how you’ve been lied to about art your entire lives.

¡Viva el Stuckism!