I like to think of “Pandemic 2020: Bridging the Distance” as a docu-drama painting, a documentary in its visual recording of events that have happened so far during the pandemic, in particular the balcony musical concerts as well as the daily applause for the courageous front-line health care workers. Off in the distance the rainbow stretching from Freedom Tower across Manhattan actually occurred one April day in New York city. Geographically, the painting basically documents the Brooklyn Bridge as it stretches to the Manhattan shoreline. I went on global maps to ensure that those are pretty much the buildings one would see from the East River. I did take the artistic liberty to push the Manhattan skyline further into the horizon in part to bring the Statue of Liberty into view. That is where Lady Liberty is located; however, the skyscrapers normally obscure its view from the vantage point of the painting.
The Statue of Liberty’s appearance in the scene, diminutive though it is, is paramount to its meaning. My painting then is also a drama, hopefully filled with themes, symbols and characterizations that service a higher truth than the actual facts of the subject matter. I think of the urban neighborhood in the foreground as no particular neighborhood in Brooklyn or in Brooklyn at all for that matter. It is a scene of many American cities where art districts revive aesthetic traditional architecture into small theaters and apartments right around the corner from brick and mortar row houses that have seen better days. In stark contrast are the modern skyscrapers across the river with astronomical rents.
“Bridging the Distance” is purposely filled with opposites that hopefully come together somehow in the viewer’s eye: the cobblestone street in the neighborhood especially cements the traditional old vs. the trendy new of the Manhattan district. The characters on the old-fashioned balconies are obviously very progressive socially. As expected in the art district, gay, straight, mixed race couples, women, men all equally accept each other.
Originally the nurse was the main protagonist in the foreground scene but I decided to add a traditionally garbed young priest. Though I am not fond of church hierarchies and rules that I feel often eclipse the original meaning of Christian living, I was recently told of a young priest that quietly visited nursing homes in the last couple months simply to help where he could. A “bridging the distance” in my own heart, I was moved and reminded of the good that can come from all walks of life other than where I currently walk.
In and of themselves, the nurse and the priest are generally representative of two very divergent worlds; science and religion seem often to be so at odds with each other in our grassroots culture today and needlessly so. The nurse and the priest beautifully work in tandem with each other, one servicing the body, the other servicing the spirit. It would be nice if we all at the very least could see religion as a testament to the wonder of the universe, an inspiration to those of us compelled to scientifically seek it out. It would be equally wonderful if all of us could see that we are all after the same thing – an intimate knowledge of who we are and where we came from. In the painting, I like to think of the positions of the priest’s car and the nurse’s ambulance as a symbolic coming together of these two worlds.
The ground zero characters of this pandemic painting are the homeless; here too I tried to create dichotomies, opposites if you will. Two homeless are white; two are brown. And again, while we think of the homeless as lost beyond human dignity, there are sparks of hope here: the trumpeter’s awakened glance at the priest, the veteran’s shaking of his tambourine, the unusually composed cross-leg position of the “sleeping” bum. We are not that disconnected from those less fortunate than us.
It is my most fervent hope that “Bridging the Distance” brings together the most obvious polar opposites in the painting – the rich and poor. While practically all of us are in a gray zone middle, it is nonetheless a dysfunctional society that allows the richest to own more wealth than the entire middle class. This is physically and morally unsustainable and far removed from the strong middle class of my youth. We’ve been down this road before. Last time it was human nature in the guise of the great depression and WWII that brought a settling of all accounts with a new deal. This time nature, a virus, will not discriminate either. We are truly all of us in all our characteristic colors in this together. That rainbow coming out of the clouds over Manhattan is our symbol. And hopefully, people will read Lady Liberty’s words with renewed awareness that a society’s humanity is ultimately judged by how it treats its most vulnerable.
