Artists Registry

THE RATIONALE FOR MY NEVER FORGET PAINTINGS

On that terrible Tuesday morning, America’s insouciance about events taking place in the middle east was forever transformed.

We had experienced precursors to this attack—a bomb explosion in a garage at the World Trade Center and a homemade torpedo ramming a docked naval vessel. But nothing comparable to the death and destruction perpetrated on our own soil on 9/11/2001 by foreign renegades intent on eradicating our way of life.

In the days, months, and years following 9/11, there have been many efforts not only to memorialize the innocent people destroyed by this tragedy, but also to arouse sympathy for the perpetrators of this crime.

I was personally affected by one artistic attempt to accomplish the latter. The famous Columbian artist, Fernando Botero, created and published drawings and paintings that depict the treatment of captured jihadists by American guards at Abu Ghraib in grossly despicable illustrations.

I am in no way competent to comment on the veracity of Botero’s depictions, but his art fails to consider the egregious acts of the comrades of these prisoners that resulted in the deaths of thousands of innocent men and women who died on 9/11, or the effect of their crime on the psyche of these guards.

I wanted my paintings to reflect the experience of New Yorkers who were forever impacted by the catastrophe. Two of the paintings were inspired from images of people observing and fleeing from the collapse of the towers. The painting, Never Forget, was created by my imagining the horror of those who escaped the inferno by committing suicide.