About the artist
2020 was filled with once in a lifetime events. When the pandemic struck, I began working from home. I turned my daily commuting time into daily painting time. Painting daily is not new to me. I did a series of 30 paintings in 30 days in 2013 and again in 2018. I painted daily when I was healing from cancer in 2006. My first pandemic paintings were still lives, done in the safety of my home. In time I acquired heavy duty masks and ventured out. I began biking downtown regularly to paint. At first I focused on painting the University. As time went on, I was drawn to observe the changing face of State Street. As a native Madisonian, State Street is a part of my identity. My parents had brought me to State as a child and I hung out there in high school and college. I wanted to come out and see first hand what was happening there. When the pandemic hit, State was abandoned in a way I had never seen before. Then it was damaged and soon after transformed by temporary works of art. I returned regularly to see change and record what was happening. Drawing by drawing I assembled a full portrait of the street.
This book is the product of that confluence of events, but even though this was new territory, I was able to draw on previous experiences to complete this project. This was a time of stress and I had gone through that before. The process of repeated observation at a time of crisis is quite similar to the process I followed in creating 36 self portraits while I was undergoing chemotherapy in 2006. This was not my first time to compose images in the winter. I had painted outdoors in all seasons during my life at St. Benedict Center 1993 - 2000 (now Holy Wisdom Monastery) and before that when I was living and painting landscape in Monroe in the early 1990’s. The panoramic images from this book relied on the skills I had built composing mural images. I created a mural for Madison CitiArts (1994), numerous murals under Peggy Zalucha at Millennium Murals (1998-2005) and a mural at First Baptist Church (2015). The skills of transforming images on a page into a published format is quite familiar to me from my time as editor and writer of the Wisconsin Visual Artist’s magazine (2003-19).
I am glad 2020 is behind us. I think the thing that got me through it was hanging on to that which I am good at, (drawing) and sharing it with others. At the time my sharing was cautious and tempered by social distance. Now it is time to put this out in the public realm. I am grateful that I was able to document a small part of these events.
This book is the product of that confluence of events, but even though this was new territory, I was able to draw on previous experiences to complete this project. This was a time of stress and I had gone through that before. The process of repeated observation at a time of crisis is quite similar to the process I followed in creating 36 self portraits while I was undergoing chemotherapy in 2006. This was not my first time to compose images in the winter. I had painted outdoors in all seasons during my life at St. Benedict Center 1993 - 2000 (now Holy Wisdom Monastery) and before that when I was living and painting landscape in Monroe in the early 1990’s. The panoramic images from this book relied on the skills I had built composing mural images. I created a mural for Madison CitiArts (1994), numerous murals under Peggy Zalucha at Millennium Murals (1998-2005) and a mural at First Baptist Church (2015). The skills of transforming images on a page into a published format is quite familiar to me from my time as editor and writer of the Wisconsin Visual Artist’s magazine (2003-19).
I am glad 2020 is behind us. I think the thing that got me through it was hanging on to that which I am good at, (drawing) and sharing it with others. At the time my sharing was cautious and tempered by social distance. Now it is time to put this out in the public realm. I am grateful that I was able to document a small part of these events.
