This is a painting which has perplexed many a visitor to the Hahn household. It is one of a handful of self portrait "People on the Couch" paintings I have done in recent years. Allow me to dissect.... The scene takes place in my living room on my comfy green couch. There I lay in my fuzzy white slippers, a book in my lap. The book is a biography about Bob Dylan, someone whom I had idolized since childhood. Having fallen in love with his music and never really thinking too much about what kind of a person he might actually be, I am shocked and disheartened by the picture painted of him in the biography. Hence the title "Fallen Idol." There is Bob, stiff, like the marble god I had made him out to be, falling off the pedestal I had planted him on in my mind since I was young. For anyone who has listened to Bob Dylan's songs the rest of the imagery is fairly self explanatory. There is a train coming in the distance through my window with crosses as railroad ties (Slow Train Coming) On my head is my (Leopard Skin Pill Box Hat) The blood from my heart falls on to the railroad tracks reflecting both my sadness at the book's revelations and is the (Blood on the Tracks). My desert island album. To the left is my big brass bed (Lay Lady Lay, the first of his songs I ever heard) and above it, the jack of hearts. (Lily, Rosemary and the Jack of Hearts)There, not so strange after all, hum? :0)
