Days of other people's lives

We live our lives facing days as they come. At times we hit periods of bland repetition. We may become bored with our routines. Sometimes our days live us and we wake up to weeks or months having gone by.

Contented routines or frustrating stretches of career make us lose awareness of the lives of others.

The painting above, "Close to the Limit," came to me in the summer of 1993.

Months of news reports about long periods of rain in the heartland culminated in stories of lost harvests, lost homes, lost lives.

Levees had given way all along the Missouri and Mississippi rivers. Farm land was flooded, small rural towns were inundated. Evening news footage of people wading in hip-deep water in their living rooms, trying to save what they could of their belongings. I remember the image of a young wife carrying out an armful of things. Among them were a stuffed toy and a small American flag.

These reports went on for days as the flooding worked it way down the Mississippi.

Something about that mass misery caught my attention. I've forgotten whatever was going on in my life at the time. But I remember that large swath of misery and sorrow. I was safe and dry.

I responded to it with an image of an aging farmer who didn't go to his neighbor's funeral, who had nothing left but ruined land ... and was not going to be able to take one more piece of bad news.

I don't show the painting much. Who would want to live with a painful reminder of tragedy hanging on the wall? But I keep it. It is a reminder worth keeping.


The technical information on the painting is that it's 24" x 18", acrylic paint on canvas. Most of my paintings are in acrylics on canvas.

The irony here is that acrylic is a water-based medium and canvas is a cotton product grown in the river deltas of the South. Flood zones.