The (Last) Birthday

2020

Acrylic on panel

I found the pandemic a difficult time to work on my personal art practice. While my animal-based and environmentally-themed series was paused, I found myself diving deeper into figure drawing, portraiture, and printmaking–not coincidentally the very classes I was teaching remotely. While it felt like I wasn’t producing art during lockdown and the pandemic, in fact I had been, it was just different from many of the half-completed paintings begun before COVID-19. This painting is a portrait of my late father, painted from photographs taken at his last birthday party before his passing in October of 2018.