"U.S. Life Expectancy Falls by a Year" Portrait Oil Painting on Canvas
This vintage-inspired oil painting portrait depicts a young woman who lived during the 1918 Pandemic. Her background and name were not included in the source material's information, so her story is unknown.
• Original painting based on an original photograph
• Painting measures 24 by 36 by 1 inch
• Ships prepared with hanging hardware. All you need is one nail in the wall!
• FREE shipping to the continental U.S.
• Edges of the canvas are painted blue
• Painting is varnished, so it's protected from wear and sunlight
• Satin varnish finish means this painting will not have glare but the colors remain saturated
• Includes optional digital/physical certificate of authenticity from the artist
This painting is one of three works that currently form the "This Place, Another Place" series. Each composition is inspired by black and white photos taken during the 1918 Flu pandemic that were scanned by the Library of Congress and then added to their Public Domain Database. The photos are recreated and painted in full color, making them more accessible to contemporary audiences. The background compositions are based on microscope slide images of COVID-19 virus cells. Finally, the titles of each piece are taken from article headlines about the COVID-19 Pandemic sourced from national newspapers.
These paintings seek to connect the past to the present, an attempt to imagine the experience of those who have lived through events similar to the Pandemic we are communally experiencing now. I'm interested in reviving these portraits because the people in them must have felt like we do right now; their worlds in upheaval, loss, panic, fear around them all the time, only for them to have become ghostlike, barely remembered and visible only in grainy photographs. Yet the mystery of their lives seems uncomfortable and to the unrelenting knowing we experience now with the COVID-19 pandemic; our lives are directly connected to the 24/7 news cycle and the latest theories all the time. We know so much more than those who lived during the 1918 Pandemic did, but we are experiencing the same emotional, social, political, and cultural upheaval. During the current pandemic, mystery has become a terrorizing force, but I want to explore the mystery of the past through a present lens without fear.
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