Jesse Chapman: Johnny Milton

Ever get the feeling you’ve been cheated?
—Johnny Rotten, Winterland Ballroom, San Francisco, January 14, 1978 (the Sex Pistols’ last gig)

McCaffrey Fine Art is delighted to present Johnny Milton, a new multipanel narrative painting by Jesse Chapman. The title is a conflation of John Milton, the author of the epic seventeenth-century poem Paradise Lost, and Johnny Rotten, the front man for the late 1970s English punk band the Sex Pistols.

Chapman describes the genesis of the painting as follows:
I started with the evictions that were discernible by piles of particleboard furniture appearing in yards around where I live. This subject brought me to Paradise Lost. I was also reading Greil Marcus’s Lipstick Traces, which links the Sex Pistols with a line of quasi-progenitors, all the way back to a medieval cult called the “Brethren of the Free Spirit”(with whom Hieronymus Bosch may have been affiliated). It seemed odd that John Milton was never mentioned, because his regicidal stance in politics and his sympathetic portrayal of the Antichrist seem to me worthy of a place in the front ranks of such an assembly.