Shakespeare’s Face Reinterpreted: The Second Coming of Artist Rocky Bettis

(“Shakespeare Considered Sepia” 2024 digital painting by Aberjhani based on original 1623 First Folio engraving by Martin Droeshout.) 

 
“Life beats down and crushes the soul and art reminds you that you have one.” -- Stella Adler (from Stella Adler on America's Master Playwrights)

1. Different Times and New Places 

 Have you ever noticed how that ultimate icon of English literature, William Shakespeare (1564–1616), sometimes pops up in places where you might least expect to find him? That was my experience twice in February 2024. The first instance occurred while I was conducting research online for a James Baldwin Centennial Project and received several Google search results referencing Baldwin’s essay, “Why I Stopped Hating Shakespeare.” The great “Bard’s” name had not been included with my query, while Baldwin (1924-1987) had recently been the subject of a Google Black History Month doodle, so the search result seemed odd. 

The second instance would occur after I learned an artist, Rocky Bettis, whom I had met only once before back in 2020 (when the pandemic was growing more lethal by the day) had a new exhibit at the Gallery Espresso Coffee Shop in downtown Savannah, Georgia. It had opened February 1 and was scheduled to close April 1, 2024. Our first meeting had been completely accidental and occurred when I happened to spot an installation of his paintings in a in a car port in a lane off Liberty Street. The unexpected discovery produced an essay titled “Encounter with Artist Paul Cezanne in Downtown Savannah.” News of the Gallery Espresso (GE) exhibition was exciting because in the midst of surviving the masks-on and masks-off days of the pandemic, I had lost contact with Bettis. 

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