For Ukraine
Throughout much of my adult life I have been an avid follower of what’s going on in the world. Online newspapers – New York Times, The Guardian, The New Yorker – are main sources of information. I also follow cable news most evenings. The war in Ukraine – when it began last winter – was ever present in all the news sources I follow. The horror of an unprovoked attack by Russia on a western looking nation in Eastern Europe, was shocking, appalling and horrific. The images of bombed out infrastructure, neighborhoods, city centers, the devasting murder of innocent civilian targets and the refugee crisis – were daily imprints on my perceptions of a world gone mad. It was not possible to ignore the daily shock of the photographed victims of the attacks. I started a daily practice last year of making contour drawings in the evenings. All kinds of figurative subjects were what I worked with from photographic sources and my imagination. I wasn’t after conceptualizing, rather, they were exercises in engagement with pure drawing. At one point in winter of this year around the beginning of the war I noticed an image that affected me viscerally.
The photograph was of several civilians who were struck down in the street by a Russian attack. Ukrainian soldiers were in the photograph tending to the deceased. I started to draw from the photograph with no aim in mind but to document for myself an image of the war. The drawing was interesting, it represented a moment in time that I wanted to capture. My daily drawing practice, then, proceeded to document images of the war in a focused manner.
At the beginning of my career as an artist, I worked with political media imagery and that of societal trauma. I segued onto other subjects as time went on and so through the 2000’s until a few years back had other artistic agendas. I gradually started to switch gears in my concerns and made paintings that began to readdress my agenda from early years in my career as an artmaker. The drawing that generated my Ukraine project set the tone for re-engagement with imagery from war. I searched photographs in the online news outlets and collected dozens including many screenshots from cable news sources.
The paintings shown here are stylistically continuous with previous work. My process is to work from multiple sources composited to create an idea. My own photographs were also employed. The paintings become metaphors that specifically address the troubled and horrific reality of the war in Ukraine. The spaces are unreal settings with incongruous juxtapositions of images that communicate with each other in the pictorial space.
Titles are phrase fragments from Ukrainian poetry written in response to the original invasion and takeover of Crimea and eastern portions of Ukraine.
