The painting was done in Spring 2020 at the onset of the San Francisco’s shelter-in-place mandate. The work is comprised of many small brushstrokes and texture, a time-consuming and labor-intensive technique intentionally done to reflect the additional hours spent in my studio when the city shut down. The repetition of these marks signifies the dilation of time, as well as the collective experience of life under lockdown. I thought about how, for the first time in the history of the world, every country was confronted with the same problem.
My studio is located on the San Francisco Bay at a decommissioned naval base, and the shades of blue allude to my surroundings of water. The gradation of these colors, from dark to light, is a reference to the temporal existence of all things (good and bad), as well as a literal and metaphorical representation of light prevailing over darkness.