IN DARK TIMES.
I've been making books filled with collage-paintings. I'm on my second book now. I make them automatically, unplanned, using imagery and language from home design magazines and books published in the 1940s and 50s with titles like The Peoples of the United States, America and Me, and YOU and the Americas. I bought them at the local library during one of their "bag of books for a dollar" sales.
The paintings are about the atrocities currently happening in our country—the imagery marries past with present—how little has changed in sixty or seventy years. As I stay in quarantine still, as a seriously at-risk-person, and salvage fragments of America’s past, I think of George Floyd and I can't look away. I make a funerary painting the day Floyd's funeral is held in Houston. I learn of the facts in Breonna Taylor's murder as the rest of us do, and Ahmaud Arbery's murder; I remember Sandra Bland, Eric Garner, Trayvon Martin, Michael Brown, and the long list of names that came before. I hear and watch the protests. I see the police with their guns and tear gas as protestors take a knee. I watch unknown men in uniform arresting, tasing, kidnapping citizens, from our own streets and putting them into unmarked vehicles; the line of mothers in protest; I watch the death toll charts; the covid hotspot areas; The New York Times daily map. I shout with joy when I hear the results from the landmark 2020 Supreme Court ruling squashing the right wing attack on tribal sovereignty and how one unique case resulted in the largest restoration of tribal land in US history.
What am I looking for as I try to translate all of this pain into these densely filled paintings just a little bigger than an iPhone?
I am saying to my fifteen year old son Harrison and his generation, NEVER FORGET.
I am saying to myself that there is still a place and need for some kind of beauty, for painting, for art.
I am saying, as Bertolt Brecht put it,
"In the dark times,
Will there also be singing?
Yes, there will be singing.
About the dark times.”