S T A T E M E N T:
Little I can add in words can reconcile the profound effect that
the tragic events of September 11 has had on our lives. I do know that personally, my own internal
compass has been altered. Later that day, while at a local gas station I tried to relate to
another, unaware driver what I had seen on TV earlier that morning. His response was, "Well,
that just can't be right!" We all shared his disbelief.
The loss of life was enormous and a tragic injustice to us all…man,
woman and child. Lives were shattered. The tumult exceeded the imagination and emotional range
that we thought we were capable of. Our emotional, moral and humanitarian compasses, to name a
few, were spinning. Juxtaposed to this lost, or might I say stolen, innocence was an outpouring
of the greatest sense of humanity I know I personally have ever seen or felt, exemplified by
ordinary citizens, especially the people of uniform who have dedicated their lives to our well
being…police, fire, health care, postal, and of course, armed services. Our compasses point to
new heroes.
In our remembrances to the lives and the life that we knew before
9-11, a true rebirth in our sense of who we are individually, and collectively, who we are as a
country and as citizens of the world, based on the courage and compassion shown by our new heroes,
resonates with us all.
As a visual artist, my compass, too, was turned. Every artist deals with his/her world through
their art. This is at the essence of art…of being an artist. To deny the pain is to deny everything.
Do we not need singing, dancing, laughing…life!? Yes we do and yes we must!
My own feelings of sorrow and even melancholia sometimes resonated with the body of work I started,
at other times the whole question of dealing visually with the 9-11 tragedy ate at my innards.
The disarray was pervasive. Could working through this visually for myself be of any value to others?
I heard Garrison Keillor say it was the artist's duty to take something hard, painful, tragic and
transform it into something we can handle, something beautiful. Meaning of course that both now
and in the future we need a means to access and reflect upon the meaningful events in our lives.
Sometimes we have to realign our compasses.
PROCESS
My process was quite simple and straightforward once one realizes
that the 10 works in this series are actually the parts of the whole. In my efforts to respond to
the tragic events of 9-11, a number of issues…emotions…images relentlessly presented themselves,
and even competed with each other, to dominate my own personal handling of this most profound event
in our lives. I realized that similarly, no one image was ever going to encapsulate the whole
gamut of emotional response that often occurred simultaneously. Thus the work was conceived as
such… a charged, often conflicting and unsettling, emotional panorama…which was then deconstructed,
or divided out, into the 10 individual works.
Because of the radical new approach the computer allows, I actually
worked on all 10 works compositionally at the same time, copying, cutting, pasting, importing and
exporting masks and their object layers at will. Only after the 10-work body was compositionally
complete did I then work individually on each in the painting program. The conceptualization itself
was based on the constant torrent of imagery, emotion and response alluded to above.
Although the works were given a title only very late in the process,
the titles nevertheless explore a good part of my own emotional response. From: shattered and
tumult; to humanity, compassion and remembrance; to innocence and rebirth; to sorrow, melancholia
and disarray; the 10 titles were formed. Only after the works were completed and signed did I
thereafter go back into a copy of the digital file and explore some additional shadings of mood,
color and tone, and thus designating them all as variations one through five on each title.
On certain days one variation resonates more than another. I have made individual title montages
of each of the 10 titled pieces. Each of these has the larger title piece and the smaller four
variations. Lastly, I recombined all into the 11th work, 9-11, montage.
Reginald Brooks, February 7, 2002
|
Close Window |
