(NOTE: You can click on each image to view details about each of the paintings.)

2020 is, of course, the year we were asked – or ordered – to stay home to avoid the spread of Covid-19. Except for a few days at the beginning of the stay-at-home order, I reported to work.

Since I could not go to museums or take classes in person, I decided to follow a course by Alex Hillkurtz on urban watercolor painting. That thrust me into a frenzy of painting like I hadn’t experienced since my days in college. Every day, back from work, I would sit in my studio and paint. Some people saw my work online and either bought the images or commissioned me to create them.

I set myself the following principles in choosing what to paint: if I worked from a photograph, it had to be one I took; if I took an image from somewhere else, it would only be a screen capture from a video; and, I would always modify what I saw so it would not be a straight copy from a photo.

In this process, I remembered there were some bas-relief from buildings I had walked by in Chicago that haunted me for years, so they became another source of material for watercolors.

Then came the demonstrations and riots around the country. I ride my bicycle downtown to take the train to work, and the change of energy around me prompted me to keep my phone recording all the time, just in case I found myself in a situation I wanted or needed to document.

I have a hard time sitting down and watching movies, but this was the year I spent long hours watching Netflix and Amazon Prime movies as I never did before in my life. I started sketching from these series.

Finally, I always liked to draw the human body but, again, because of Covid restrictions, I could not participate in the figure drawing sessions in studios around Chicago. So, one day I went looking for contemporary dance videos on YouTube and landed on a recording of an Italian aerialist, Andrea Paoli. From there, I discovered that other aerialists post their training videos on Instagram and I began sketching and painting them.