Indian Iconography Paintings
My Indian Iconography paintings were born from Ken Kesey’s book One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (1962).
In the novel, Chief Bromden—a towering, six-foot-five Columbia River Indian—hides in silence inside a closet, inside an insane asylum, pretending to be deaf and dumb to shield himself from the world outside. He is the son of a proud tribe that once lived on the edge of Portland, Oregon, where they built magnificent cedar scaffolds across waterfalls rivaling Niagara. These weren’t just fishing platforms—they were works of art, woven into the mist, used to spear salmon surging upstream.When the U.S. government arrived. They needed the falls dammed to power turbines to fuel Oregon’s growth. They offered the tribe great wealth to sell their homeland.
The boy—Chief—watched it all collapse. His father, once the head of a proud nation, took the money and drank himself into ruin. The tribe, uprooted and rich, fell into whiskey, gambling, prostitution—every trap that devours a human soul. The scaffolds were torn down. The salmon runs choked behind concrete. A culture drowned in a flood of cash and despair. That’s the ghost in my paintings: not just a man in a closet, but a nation in one.
Ken Kesey wasn’t just mourning a culture gone with the wind. In 1962—amid the shiny, smiling Disneyland Americana culture of the 1950s—he was sounding a prophetic alarm: The Columbia River scaffolds, the salmon runs, the chief’s name—all erased for progress, power, profit. Kesey held up the mirror: If they can dam a river, drown a people, and call it civilization…they can do it to you. Your suburban lawns, your TV dinners, your flag-waving certainty— and especially your Protestant Christian Puritanism - they’re just temporary scaffolding too. One day the turbines will turn, the offer will come, and the culture you thought was forever will also be Gone With the Wind.
The Indian’s fall wasn’t the end. It was the warning and Ken Kesey wasn’t just the messenger—he was the weapon. While Chief Bromden’s story warned of cultural collapse, Kesey himself became the instrument that accelerated it.
Tom Wolfe captured it perfectly in his electric, near-mythic book The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test (1968)—a hard-to-find, hallucinatory textbook, of Kesey’s Merry Pranksters and their psychedelic crusade.
Here’s what happened:
• 1964: Kesey, fresh off Cuckoo’s Nest fame, buys a 1939 International Harvester school bus, paints it in Day-Glo swirls, and names it “Furthur.”
• He loads it with LSD-spiked Kool-Aid, a film crew, and a tribe of acid evangelists—including Neal Cassady (the real-life Dean Moriarty from On the Road).
• They crisscross America, pulling up unannounced at college campuses, civil rights rallies, Beat poetry readings, and suburban lawns.
• At each stop: free acid, blaring rock, strobing lights, and a single command— “Turn on, tune in, drop out.”
The Beatles (Magical Mystery Tour), Grateful Dead, Jefferson Airplane—all part of the same current. Kesey didn’t just predict the fall of the old order. He handed out the dynamite.
Within one decade, the Disneyland 1950s—with its crew cuts, nuclear families, and “I Like Ike” faith—collapsed.
Replaced by:
• Free love
• Anti-war riots
• Communes
• Heroin in the suburbs
• Trust in institutions—gone
Kesey didn’t just write the obituary of Native America. He live-streamed the autopsy of the entire postwar dream. And America? It drank the Kool-Aid.
Aleister Crowley—once branded “the wickedest man in the world”—claimed he knew Adolf Hitler was demon-possessed because, after World War I, Hitler had experimented with peyote (a hallucinogenic like LSD) in the occult underground of Munich. Crowley said the drug ripped open a door, and something non-human stepped through. This raises a darker question: Did Ken Kesey know the same trick? Kesey didn’t summon demons. He handed out LSD like communion wine—on a Day-Glo bus, to college kids, to America itself. Crowley said peyote opened the gate. Kesey used acid to open the same gate to unsuspecting college students.
Peyote entered a demon into one man. LSD entered demons into a nations culture.
If you can alter the mind, you can alter the world.
Both cultures unmade, remade, and never the same.
Kesey didn’t just predict the collapse of 1950s America.
He drove the bus that ran it off the cliff.