Chase Gallery

Chase.  This one began while I was living in West Los Angeles in 2011.  I used to frequent quite a few coffee shops while I was there to work on various drawings.  One was kind of near this bank if you walked west a few blocks beside a gas station.  As I walked by, I couldn’t help noticing that the logo kind of looked like a nazi symbol.

I did some research into the Chase and found out they actually did have a history of funding Hitler and the nazis in World War II.  Chase Manhattan avoided prosecution for any selling of the gold teeth and riches plundered from the bodies of the Jews and other people killed in concentration camps.

Chase was given a pass allegedly because they had some serious dirt on some politicians in our government to the Third Reich.  Prescott Bush, father of our deceased ex-president George H. W. Bush and grandfather of George W. Bush funded a lot of what Hitler was doing.  And Prescott Bush was a banker after all.  A slap on the wrist gave us trillions in debt and millions of innocent people killed in war.

Here’s the logo how it looked only the Chase lettering was white on the building that made it into the final piece:

You’re just asking for it with a logo that much like a nazi symbol!  I did several drawings of this logo until I happened on an idea to put a plus symbol in the middle extending the white space legs of the Chase symbol halfway on each side, and you get my version!

There were lots of pigeons around this sign that liked to perch on this building as it was one of the lowest buildings in that area.  There were streams of pigeon crap all over the top of the building when I took the original photograph.  I even saw some on the logo itself when I looked closer, but this didn’t show up in the original photograph.

I tried to capture them when they landed on the logo, but none of them wanted to land on it that day, so I found a photo of a Bruce’s Green Pigeon that was quite colorful and included that instead.  It was too far away to make out the pigeons in the original photos I took, so I made him bigger.

This started out as an oil painting done on the dastardly Gessobord I’ve written about on here as having destroyed all my old paintings.  It really turned out great according to my impossible standards and only took me a few weeks to do.  I really liked how it turned out, but again, it wouldn’t have ever lasted until today as Gessobord is an inferior surface to what I use now.

As you can see, this painting before it was destroyed by poor foundations, didn’t have the columns extend like the digital version does now.  You can see in the reflection on the left how under the blue ribbon in the black area some of the decaying going on with Gessobord.  I use a way different series of mediums than I make now, and they may work on this glued paper strips Gessobord masonite now, but you’ll never catch me trying that surface again as it caused me to lose 10 or more paintings!

This was a basic design, so it was easy to make it into a piece of vector art with Inkscape as I thought this was still a vital design.  It was too difficult to add all the pigeon crap on the top of the building using Inkscape, so I removed it and it ended up looking cleaner as it brought the focus back to the pigeon.

Of course the pigeon droppings on the final version are vital as it makes my statement about nazis clear.

Here’s a better photo of this painting I used on my old 2015 website that took 2 full minutes to load and no one bought anything from me then.  My Uncle Stanley who died a couple months after taking the covid vaccines a couple years ago bought a mug to help me test if the payment gateway worked.

This current site wouldn’t have been possible then, and there wasn’t the type of software improvements, nor had I invented the oil medium innovations yet to do the type of art that I do now.

So, there’s the story of Chase, and it still exists now even though the original oil painting is gone.