The Blue Bus is Calling Us

About The Blue Bus is Calling Us

This contemporary figurative oil painting explores themes of politics and culture.

Deborah Root’s dynamic colourful compositions tell an intimate story about her experience during socially relevant and politically important moments in time.

“I started my first year of senior high school in 1968, a month after the police rioted at the Chicago Democratic Convention. Thanks to television with its daily coverage of the Vietnam War, teenagers of my generation were able to construct a continuum between domestic police violence, what was happening in Southeast Asia, and the adults who supported the war machine -- adults with dubious values, adults we lived with. In response, many of us turned to the so-called "youth culture" of sex, drugs, and rock and roll.

I’ve been thinking about the effects of war both on the people directly affected and on those living outside of the conflict zones—in this painting, it is the Vietnam War during my high school years. The war was there, we knew it, our older brothers were dealing with the draft, we were protesting against it but, unlike those directly under fire in Vietnam, we were able to indulge in hedonism, which at the time also felt like a kind of protest. My Seattle hometown was a radical city and very active in antiwar protests--at the same time, there were several military bases nearby. This meant that certain recreational drugs, brought into the US by returning GIs, were available to us. Here, stoned teenagers smoke joints as they drive around in a blue convertible. But regardless of how much these US kids wish to avoid the "bad vibes," the machines of war remain in the background and the Mekong lies below. The painting's title comes from The End, the Doors song famously used in Coppola’s Apocalypse Now and, for my generation, associated with the surreal and drug-soaked insanity of the Vietnamese war.” Deborah Root

Deborah Root is a painter, writer, lecturer and professor. She has written extensively on the relationship between visual arts and cultural politics.
Root was born in Seattle and attended university in Canada before settling here. She acquired both her BA and MA in Archeology and Anthropology at Canadian universities and finally a PH.D. from the Graduate Program in Social and Political Thought at York University.
Her 1996 book entitled ‘Cannibal Culture’ was included in a 2017 Buzzfeed list (digital media company) of the 16 books to read to understand white supremacy in the United States. She has taught at several Canadian universities and has sat on the boards of a number of Toronto-based art and political magazines. Deborah Root has exhibited her paintings in both solo and group shows in Canada, the U.S. and Europe since 2017.