The social isolation during the past six months of the pandemic has changed the way we live and the way we think about in-person human interactions. I was curious to explore what would happen to my artwork if I imposed similar restrictions, i.e., standing at least six feet away from what I was making and…
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March 12, 2020 was my wife’s birthday. I left early to go to a sales meeting in New Jersey from my apartment in Manhattan. An Uber picked me up at 7a.m. and I was at the Marriott in Teaneck in 25 minutes flat. Breezed through the GW bridge in mere minutes; the city was already…
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In April of this year, as the apple trees were budding and an abundance of water fowl near my home were nesting in preparation for their eggs to hatch, The Pandemic paid no notice. It raged on invisibly moving through communities while visibly wreaking havoc. I was teaching college students visual literacy via an online…
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As an artist, I seek to blend the contents of my mental and emotional world with selective components of external reality, often derived from photography and digital painting. Bits and pieces of the external world are frequently the basis of my compositions, which are intuitively distorted into different levels of abstraction. There is always a…
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As fate would have it, this painting is hanging right now at the Provincetown Art Museum in a group show in their spacious exhibition gallery. “In the Spirit of Fire,”was painted back in 2017, with oil stick, acrylic, pigment and mixed media on a 24”x24” wood panel. Owing to our pandemic lockdown, it’s been hanging there all of this spring and summer, until the museum finally reopened in July. By that time, the title of this painting, channeled from somewhere in the ether — as was most of the painting itself – has become more relevant, revelatory.
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I love to paint roads. For me, they are metaphors for broader aspects of our lives. What’s ahead? What will we find around the corner? Where does this lead? These are questions we all face in life, particularly now in the pandemic. They are also the ponderings people ask about when viewing my minimalist road…
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On March 18, 2020, I went to my studio at Waltham Mills in Waltham, Massachusetts, and brought home boxes of art supplies, paint, and my small loom to hunker down for what I thought, what we may all have thought, would be a relatively short time. A couple of years earlier, I had begun creating…
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So many roads were not taken in 2020. So many opportunities were squandered. There was the road where someone in the administration actually read the federal government’s 2016 Pandemic Playbook. The road where instead of lying President Trump told us how bad it was going to get so we could prepare and take precautions. The…
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Jay Samit, innovator, artist, author, and internationally-acclaimed public speaker, usually spends a lot of time on airplanes and in hotel rooms, but the pandemic has restricted him to his home for more than 200 days, and counting. He has used these months to deliberate on the cultural meanings and implications of our current global crisis…
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Since the pandemic began, I have been sequestered in my home in Los Angeles. As an asthmatic, I have now been sheltering in place for more than 200 days (with the only exception being a doctor’s visit). Determined to find a silver lining, I chose to view the quarantine as a gift of time and…
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