A Most Violent Year

Alone, dead winter, and again, I’m awake with the ravens. I haven’t really slept since the end of November. On a Fulbright grant in Kyiv, the city of my birth. From a country that no longer exists. In a new country I no longer know, I must spend the remainder of the cold months in Ukraine.

The extended metaphor: journey is uphill and the perils too real. War, martial law, global market economies, all of our lives in the balance, and always, the missing. The missing and the art are the only constants.

My studio looks like a room prepped for an execution. Plastic wall to ceiling, and I’m painting about myself, about vulnerability, about love, about longing. I’m painting about politics, about turmoil, about misunderstanding. I’m painting about systemic violence, and the present so informed by nostalgia.

The winter lasts right up until the summer. I have completed some projects and broken new ground. I have suffered but ate well. I, mostly intact, brought back this testament of my time and labor for your consideration.