A few years ago, Northfield artist Mark Daehlin went into a dark period. He lacked inspiration, got lazy, and suffered several false starts to get his art back on track.
He worried that his 40-year career as an artist was over after he quit doing commercial artwork. But, how would he pay the bills?
“The only art I found rewarding to make at that time was work I’d been doing for my church,” said Daehlin.
Then, in 2020, George Floyd was killed by police in Minneapolis setting off a summer of unrest and a nation tearing itself apart.
He said a prayer asking for divine help with his lagging motivation.
“I need a real mission,” he explained. “I need something to get me out to the studio in the morning. Please give me something that’ll move me to work, something worth doing.”
And, just like that, Daehlin had found his muse after watching the video shot by a bystander of police standing on Floyd’s neck.
Within an hour, the artist decided to start a portrait he’s thought about painting for decades: a portrait of Abraham Lincoln. He found a canvas laying around, took it out to his backyard studio.
“I found a photo that captured the pathos and humanity of the man,” he explained.
After projecting the photo to enlarge it, he started painting and found that the old desire, freedom and motivation came back to him.
He finished the Lincoln portrait in a few days.
“I knew then what I had to do,” he said. “I started the series the next day and have been working on it ever since.”
With his wife Suzanne researching other freedom fighters using internet sources, he’s captured other critically important Civil Rights historical figures on canvas including Harriet Tubman, Ida B. Wells, Frederick Douglass, WEB Dubois, Rosa Parks, bell hooks, Malcolm X, Josephine Baker, James Baldwin, John Brown and Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.
Visually engaging
“The heroism and vision and grit of these heroes are amazing and fascinating,” he said. “We need to get them into the hands of those who will read them and hear them and begin to understand, a little at first, then more as they take it in.”
Daehlin has chosen to portray Americans who were instrumental in the struggle for equality, were great thinkers and activists and have a compelling story to tell a viewer of any age.
The “Freedom Road heroes” series now numbers 16 portraits. Viewed as a body of work the result is powerful, bold, arresting and impactful.
“This work is not political,” said Suzanne, a former elementary school art teacher who is now a hospice masseuse. While all the heroes are different, she said, they share the heroic traits of questioning the status quo, facing fear, showing determination and risking death.
Daehlin said he usually starts his portraits by sketching the eyes, then their individual stories influence what else happens on the canvas. Every canvas contains a single figure — except for the one depicting the three civil rights workers, James Chaney, Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner, who were killed by a group of more than 20 Klansmen in Mississippi in June 1964. The slain men had traveled to Mississippi to register Black voters and work in the civil rights movement.
“No other story affected me so deeply,” said Daehlin, gesturing to the portrait of the three murdered freedom fighters. “I was so angry at their story, I was throwing paint on the canvas. Their story was an insanity of violence.”
Lincoln is the only Freedom Road Hero Daehlin painted twice. He explained that he wanted to capture two different periods in the 16th U.S. President’s tumultuous life. In both versions, he uses a patriotic color palette, but then amplifies an abstractness that may remind some art aficionados of bold, bright works by the popular 1960s graphics illustrator Peter Max.
While he was painting one of the Lincoln portraits, Daehlin said he felt like he was looking not just into Abe’s eyes, but into his soul. “I realized when he was looking right back at me that he was a real human being who suffered greatly. I felt that he came alive in that moment and we communicated for a time, just the two of us.”
Growing up in Gary, a small town in northern Minnesota with a population of 300, Daelin said the news of George Floyd’s death deeply troubled him. “I lived an illusion that we didn’t have racism in Minnesota,” he said. “I was shocked. The moment I saw the news, I knew it was murder.”
Although each portrait is infused with emotions and messages, the artist said his intention was to lower the temperature surrounding race by creating a conversation starter that would win hearts, and hopefully, also win minds.
“The emotions are the road to the heart,” he said. “Stories well told with verve and emotional engagement, can sway the hearts and minds much more readily than debate ever will.”
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