Pandemic Portait Project

From the Artist: In the midst of the rapid and developing pandemic in early 2020, notable for the world’s swift adaptation and adjustment, our concept of normal was evolving; marked by shifting rumors, guidelines, ‘cures’, uncertain treatments, empty streets and stores, raw hands, and lots and lots of plexiglass. All of this came together one day while grocery shopping in March when I passed a woman in an aisle wearing a blue and yellow potholder taped to her face. She didn’t strike me as anyway odd, but rather normal. I decided to start a series of paintings I called the Pandemic Portrait Project. And as a series, the individual face is not of import, rather the community forms the pandemic portrait. I emailed people I knew and asked for photos of themselves wearing their masks. I painted them, in oil, on 8x10 sheets of canvas, cut from whatever I had available to me and what I didn’t have, I borrowed from other artists, and when completed, thumb tacked to a wall. I wanted the images to have that same feel and message of the informal, the expedient, the un-processed, somehow ‘unfinished’, as this expressed the transitory period we are all experiencing.