Oso Para Vos

Mon commentaire concernant l’auto-isolement renouvelé dans la troisième vague de COVID-19: 

Le quatrième cavalier de l’Apocalypse utilise la peste pour nous forcer à nous examiner. 
En vérité, la solitude est un miroir.

This is my twenty-fifth self-portrait, featuring two headshots in profile, and which are facing another straight-on headshot. The intention is to simulate an age-weathered Warhol-era Pop-Art silk-screened graphics poster background, with the figurative images in a style that might be reminiscent of charcoal and oil stick sketches. Here pop-art meets and confronts the classical-modernist sketching class. Having resided just a few blocks from Warhol’s studio, I never once wondered about or marveled at the co-existence of these two art worlds in the same neighborhood. Life and Art were a cross between a busy beehive and an everyday circus back then. But all worlds met up at nighttime … at bars, rock, punk and New Wave clubs, discotheques, coffee shops … and sex clubs/gay saunas. 

This naked and introspective selfie-study is a commentary on the Artist in social distance isolation, and is in reality a subjective investigation of oneself. How does one see and perceive oneself privately — through different angles and profiles — like when we look into a mirror?

“Art should comfort the disturbed, and disturb the comfortable”.
— Cesar A. Cruz

MIRROR OF DARKNESS.

Quite enraptured by my own image
in a Mirror of Darkness,
I abandon both reflection and shadow
for a glimpse of the Unknown.

The night offers no refraction other than
the glint of an inner eye:
Yea, the paradox of Blindness is revealed
through discovery of Self alone.

(poem and oil painting by Adam Donaldson Powell)