"Because they wanted to talk about negative stuff, and I don't know anything bad about Michael"

[Catherine Vincent]

http://www.usatoday.com/life/people/2009-08-20-jackson-paintings_N.htm?csp=34

SANTA FE — Artist David Nordahl was at home painting in February 1988 when the phone rang at midnight. A voice said, "This is Michael Jackson."
Yeah, riiiight, he thought. But he quickly realized the call was no prank.

While visiting Steven Spielberg's office, Jackson had admired one of Nordahl's paintings of Army troops invading an Apache camp as a young corporal shielded two Indian children. Now the singer was reaching out to the painter. For art lessons. "He asked if I taught drawing and painting," says Nordahl, whose realist oils of 19th-century Apaches are highly prized. "I told him I didn't, but that I'd think about it. I was really busy." Their hour-long conversation sparked a close friendship and working partnership that led Nordahl to abandon renown in the art world for a cloistered vocation as Jackson's portraitist. From 1988 to 2005, Nordahl completed thousands of drawings and roughly a dozen epic commissions, seven of which were among 2,000 Jackson items in Julien's authorized auction, which the singer sued to stop last spring.

Many canvases encapsulate Jackson's grandiose fantasies and fairy-tale worldview. In a massive triptych, he is crowned and knighted in royal robes. Along the sunlit path in Field of Dreams, he leads children of all nationalities (plus sister Janet, AIDS activist Ryan White and actor Macaulay Culkin). His firstborn son snoozes on an oversized golden throne in Prince, The Boy King.

Nordahl, 68, became not only Jackson's favorite living artist (Michelangelo led the historic ranking) but a trusted adviser and confidant who designed Neverland carnival rides and joined family outings. He ducked the media for years, "because they wanted to talk about negative stuff, and I don't know anything bad about Michael," the soft-spoken Nordahl says, sitting with artist/wife Lori Peterson and frisky cat Scooter in a living room crowded with paintings by the couple. He's speaking now in hopes of brightening a picture darkened since Jackson's death June 25. "I always thought of him as normal," he says. "He's the most thoughtful, respectful person I've ever met. In 20 years, I never heard him raise his voice."

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"People write negative things because they feel that's what sells. Good news to them doesn't sell."--Michael Jackson

[Triana]

1. This is a great article. Nordahl confirms MJ's vitiligo. He was a real friend to MJ

MJ had a few of them. And the real friends he had did what Nordahl did - refused to talk to the media and shunned the spotlight. To them, their relationship with their friend was private and sacred and they didn't want it misrepresented twisted beyond recognition of any fact at all by the medialoids.

I wrote earlier about one of these friends of MJ's - someone the media offered ~$75,000 to "dish dirt" on Michael. That person told them the same: "I don't know anything negative about Michael. I can tell you a lot of positive things about him!" Media: "We're not interested in that. We only want dirt. Negative stuff. It sells better. We get more viewers and listeners and readers that way." This was before and after his death.

Not verbatim but this is what the person related that the media does and has always done with MJ. This is why REAL friends of the guy would never EVER talk to them - UNLESS they could say what they truly KNEW of Michael. And it wasn't negative.

Nordahl's article is one of those RARE instances where the effing media actually was interested in one of Michaels friends telling the TRUTH about him. Where they didn't require that it be negative dirt before they'd print it.

Thanks for posting this. Unfortunately, articles like this one are all too rare, thanks to the medialoids.

[truedelphi]

2. It's good to hear that here is one friend that couldn't be bought out.

He deserved more people like this in his life.

[Onceuponalife]

3. He didn't know "anything bad?"

He doesn't consider dangling a toddler over a high rise balcony bad?