Better Angels

While awaiting photographs from Baltimore, I thought I might write another Artist post and speak a little about what creating Better Angels has meant for me.

As I have written in other sections of this website, like millions of others, I experienced 9/11 through my television set. I experienced it as an American, and identified with it as a former New Yorker.  I sat bewildered and in shock for hours until around 3pm when someone said: “We think that more than 300 firefighters died today.” That sentence devastated me.  It brought the tragedy home. They were the ones who ran into the buildings. For me, that sentence held in full measure both the brutal tragedy and the supreme heroism of the day.

There are many challenges in being an artist: growing your work and paying your mortgage among them. Like everything, there are pluses and minuses. Some artists – and I am one – process their emotional life through their work. This may be more or less explicit, and more or less conscious. It holds true for music, literature and all the arts.

Another privilege of being an artist is that sometimes we can create work through which others can also process their own emotions.  The art creates the space for an experience that is personal to every viewer.

Better Angels did not begin because I knew firefighters.  I knew only one and he lived in Colorado.  Better Angels came from my desire to take a positive action in response to a terrible event. When The New York Times published all 343 pictures of these firefighters 12 days later, I knew I had the basic material to someday make something to honor these men.  I saved that page.  It was several years before I knew what to do with it.

Little did I know all the places that choice would take me.

I brought four paintings home from Ocean City to retouch.  One had a black mark on his nose that didn’t clean off, one had no reflections in his eyes, and two I just wanted to work on a little bit more.  This is my worktable where all 343 portraits were painted.  When I started better angels, the table was in my studio in Boulder, Colorado.  Since March 2010 it has sat in a corner of my living room in Bearsville, NY.

I have been encouraged to blog about the artist’s journey – which in this project has been long, sometimes harrowing, life-changing, full of lessons and far from over. Consider this my first post in that Category.