I find myself going between exhaustion and anger and sadness. Why can’t people wear masks properly? Why are we so focused on returning to a broken economy? What about the brown skin men being killed? Why isn’t everyone waking up to the real curve that needs to be flattened: CLIMATE? Yes there are many things I miss, but I could continue like this happily if I thought the world would emerge from this a better place for everyone on the planet. But the idea that we are doing this only to emerge to an even meaner, selfish, destructive world with a lethal virus circulating is just devastating. And so the work takes a darker turn.
This image, like many of the figures in my Quarantine art, emerged from a stereoscopic 3D image from my parents wedding of my maternal grandparents dancing with my parents. My grandfather, the one pictured is the only one of my grandparents to survive into my adulthood. I knew his face well. His face was one of those faces that did not age as he got older and looking at this image I realized I knew every bump and nuanced curve of that face. Sydney Birke was a child of the depression and he had had a hard life of poverty and loss. He had a brother who was close in age to him who died in a diving accident when he was a teen and he was the one who had to tell his mother about the accident. He loved music and worked hard to buy an instrument only to have to turn around and sell it because his family needed the money. In my lifetime he worked in the Jewelry district in NYC at a store called Simpsons. He had three wives. The first, my grandmother, died suddenly from a stroke when I was five. The second left him after almost 20 years to rediscover her gypsy roots. The third was 30 years younger than him and the first to not be Jewish. Marge was a foreign creature to me and my cousins as she was the embodiment of a middle aged wasp when she entered our lives. When my grandfather was in his late 80s she had a stroke and became mentally unwell and started to abuse my grandfather. A home health aid slipped my mother and my uncle a note and they extracted him and put him in a nursing home in Lexington and that is where he would eventually die.
Why did I leave my mother out? Well as I was making the piece I was thinking about how much I miss hugging my adult children . I have friends whose children were supposed to get married this summer and fall. Other friends who are missing graduations. It is so sad to think of these joyful events being cancelled.
But reflecting on the piece I realized there was another significance behind that white swatch of paper. I grew up in the shadow of my grandmothers' deaths. Both passed away suddenly when I was 5 and it had a large impact on my parents who were in their 20s. My mother’s grief was something I had to compete with when trying to get my mother’s attention. It was always present.
A collage made from cut up paintings Roen, my granddaughter, did. I had no idea the collage would end up being a caregiver and a baby. I posted both the black and white version and the original because I enjoy both. But also because the sketch below was done by looking at the black and white photo.
I am not a fan of this drawing. But it is another version of the series about quarantine. I might revisit.