A New Painting

And Some Thoughts About Gatekeeping the American Flag

Apr 12, 2025

This week I’ve been working on this painting titled Newport Village, a real place I visited back in 2023.

Newport Village, 2025. 16x20. Acrylic on canvas.

For insight about my obsession with trailer parks, go back and read Another Trailer Park Painting and Proud Union Home.

The first time I visited this trailer park I was too chicken to walk through it. It was the first one I attempted to get up close to. Typically I am required to keep my feet on public ground unless I have permission to photograph in private spaces. Trailer parks are privately owned properties. But that was just the excuse I made. In truth I was afraid of the poverty that existed along the broken roads and junky homes.

I had to spend a lot of time examining my fears. I had grown up in a place like this. Why was I so afraid of it as an adult, when as a child I had run freely through the gravel roads of working poor desperation?

Poverty has changed since I was a kid in the 1980s. Back then the biggest things we kids feared in my midwest town were quicksand and satanic cults. Nothing else really scared us since none of us could afford to travel to the Bermuda Triangle. The parents in our trailer park community probably feared job loss and car repairs more than anything else.

The big change in my brand of small town, white poverty is the guns. I come from a long line of hunters in central Wisconsin, so I was no stranger to long hunting rifles as a kid. My dad taught me to shoot them in my pre-teen years. There were a few families in the neighborhood that had hunting rifles, but they were never brought out for any other reason. No one had small hand guns or semi-automatic rifles. No one kept weapons as a means of protection.

The first time I drove by this trailer park in the Lakeshore region of eastern Wisconsin, I worried about angering someone with a gun. I guess I had developed an image in my head of the stand-your-ground, MAGA hat-wearing, angry dude waving a gun around to feel like he had control of something in his life. It scared me enough to wait several months to make a second visit and actually walk through and photograph this place. I did it quickly, my heart pounding the whole time. The trailer home in this painting existed pretty much as I have painted it.

But Why Is The Flag Upside Down?

The real place I visited had the flag right side up. And in comparison to the junk and debris lying around, the flag was in really nice condition.

I chose to paint the flag upside down to indicate distress. In the midst of working on this painting I attended the Hands Off protest in Green Bay. My Mister brought along a large flag mounted upside down - flag code for severe distress, as did many other participants.

Minutes after we arrived, before the rally had even begun, he was approached by two people clearly concerned about his flag. The woman expressed concern that people would believe he was a Trump supporter. The man thought he was disrespecting the flag. It felt like the homeowners association had come to scold us for painting our house the wrong color. They had clearly never been to a protest before.

My Mister and I were scolded by these protest newbies.

We tried to explain about flag code and how waiving the distress flag in our current American situation was appropriate, but they weren’t having it. In the interest of NOT creating division in our fragile local movement, we had to just walk away from them.

Here’s the thing. We all own the American Flag. It only has meaning because we collectively place it there. In a protest movement such as the one we are currently a part of, we have the right to change the meaning of our flag.

Afterword, this encounter inspired me to really think about using the American flag to indicate severe civil distress. Homelessness and the types of living conditions I have documented in Wisconsin trailer parks and captured in this painting feel like severe civil distress.

Set The Flags Free

I have long been interested in how people use flags and often capture it on photo walks. To wrap this up, I’ll leave you with a gallery of some of my favorite flag snaps from the past few years.