Separationalism: Pandemic Table for Four Painting

During the Covid-19 mandates and lockdowns, my paintings began to reflect my state of mind and the dire circumstances that I found myself in. We were all being told to separate from each other. Don't touch anything. Sterilize your hands and your environment. Get into your house, your circle, your corner and self isolate. Wear a mask. Play vaccine roulette with your health by getting an experimental shot in your arm or else lose your livelihood. Some people paid the ultimate price for this. When the government starts forcing people to engage in activities that could injure or kill them, even if it was only a few people, this is not a safe environment for human beings anymore. One injury or death from the jabs would be too many for me. I know some people might disagree if they thought the greater good was worth sacrificing some people to achieve it. I began to separate things that were inside of my paintings which I believe was a response to my outward circumstances. During the height of the pandemic, I began to paint thick, black lines to separate everything from everything else. Even in the landscapes that I was painting, I was dividing the land from the land with black lines. Even the sun in the sky had a black line around it separating it from the rest of the painting. I experimented with using other colours to make the separation marks in my artworks but nothing but thick black lines would satisfy me psychologically. Now that the threat of Covid-19 has lessened, I am now able to use gold and silver lines to make these fences between things. Another thing that emerged from my artworks was a white washing or blurring of the colors. I felt that I just couldn't get the truth from the world anymore. The mainstream media was lying to us in unison along with our governmental bodies. I began to whitewash things in my paintings. I started painting nets and artificial spider's webs and chemtrails that looked like medical gauze on and around things. Circles, triangles and other geometric shapes with distinct corners were emerging because we can all go to our corners or self isolate in our own circles of life. Literally, we were being forced into 6' circles of separation. I also began to separate the pieces of the whole painting into multi panel sections that could be separated from each other and moved around the room or rearranged. These were painted in sets of four or more.