Glass Onion

by Jonathan Morrill

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Price

$300

Dimensions

20.000 x 16.000 x 0.500 inches

Title

Glass Onion

Artist

Jonathan Morrill

Medium

Painting - Acrylic On Canvas

Description

"Glass Onion"

I told you about strawberry fields
You know the place where nothing is real
Well here's another place you can go
Where everything flows
Looking through the bent backed tulips
To see how the other half live
Looking through a glass onion

I told you about the walrus and me, man
You know that we're as close as can be, man
Well here's another clue for you all
The walrus was Paul
Standing on the cast iron shore, yeah
Lady Madonna trying to make ends meet, yeah
Looking through a glass onion

Oh yeah
Oh yeah
Oh yeah
Looking through a glass onion

I told you about the fool on the hill
I tell you man he living there still
Well here's another place you can be
Listen to me
Fixing a hole in the ocean
Trying to make a dove-tail joint, yeah
Looking through a glass onion

"Glass Onion" was John Lennon's answer to those who looked for hidden meanings in
The Beatles' music.
It was a song deliberately filled with red herrings, obscure imagery
and allusions to past works.
Fully aware of the power of The Beatles' own mythology, and with a general dislike of those who over-interpreted his work, Lennon deliberately inserted references to "I Am The Walrus", "Strawberry Fields Forever", "Lady Madonna", "The Fool On The Hill"
and "Fixing A Hole".

The effect is a kaleidoscopic look through the group's back pages.
"Lady Madonna", whose protagonist reappears in "Glass Onion",
contained a reference to "I Am The Walrus" ("See how they run").

Lennon deliberately inserted references to "I Am The Walrus",

"That's me, just doing a throwaway song, à la Walrus, à la everything I've ever written.
I threw the line in – 'the Walrus was Paul' – just to confuse everybody a bit more.
And I thought Walrus has now become me, meaning 'I am the one.'
Only it didn't mean that in this song.

It could have been 'the fox terrier is Paul,' you know. I mean, it's just a bit of poetry. It was just thrown in like that."
- John Lennon, 'All We Are Saying; byDavid Sheff


Although it was written in 1968, Lennon later claimed the line was written because he was intending to leave The Beatles.

"Well, that was a joke. The line was put in partly because I was feeling guilty because I was with Yoko and I was leaving Paul. I was trying – I don't know. It's a very perverse way of saying to Paul, you know, 'Here, have this crumb, this illusion – this stroke,
because I'm leaving'."
- John Lennon, 'All We Are Saying', David Sheff

McCartney has also revealed that during the filming of Magical Mystery Tour,
it was he who wore the Walrus costume for the song's performance.
It has been said that, although intended for Lennon,
the costume was a better fit on McCartney.
As well as the references to past Beatles songs, Lennon also inserted a number of new images to assist further myth-making.
These were bent backed tulips, the cast iron shore, a dove-tail joint
and the glass onion of the title.

"Glass Onio"n was a name suggested by Lennon for The Iveys,
a Swansea group who signed to Apple in 1968 and later became Badfinger.
Lennon retained a liking for the phrase 'glass onion', which had apt connotations of both transparency and multiple layers.

The Cast Iron Shore is a real place in Liverpool, sometimes known locally as the Cassie.
A dovetail joint, meanwhile, is even less enigmatic, being a common feature of woodwork joinery. However, Lennon may have liked the use of the word 'joint', presumably expecting many to see it as a reference to a cannabis reefer.
The bent backed tulips are believed to have been inspired by the table arrangement at Parkes, a then-fashionable restaurant on London's Beauchamp Place.
"You'd be in Parkes sitting around your table wondering what was going on with the flowers and then you'd realise that they were actually tulips with their petals bent all the way back, so that you could see the obverse side of the petals and also the stamen. This is what John meant about 'seeing how the other half lives'. He meant seeing how the other half of the flower lives but also, because it was an expensive restaurant, how the other half of society lived."
- Derek Taylor, 'A Hard Day's Write', by Steve Turner

This original acrylic painting is filled with sly tributes and frequent nods to all of those things.

Uploaded

November 25th, 2018

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