Panem et circenses

March 2020.

The pandemic. It was the lock-down.  Remember?  When a simple human interaction could kill?

Wrestling happened in front of nobody, a show without a crowd.

It was strange, empty.

That same void created distance.

I became more of an observer. I was no longer watching wrestling, I was looking at wrestling.  The visual elements stood out:  the bright colors, the shininess of the fabrics, the lights, the hair, the bodies, the blue mat, the cables and their shadows, the dynamism, the diagonals.

My way of painting also changed during that time. 

again, it was the lockdown.  I had no more surfaces to paint on, and my paint supply was limited. So I started to paint on old unsuccessful/unfinished paintings.  I applied the paint precisely and carefully in a thin layer. Painting all the shapes of one color, then all the shapes of the second color, and so on.  Like a painting by numbers, but without the drawing. The paintings took unexpected directions.  The new shapes interacting with the old ones still peeking through.

The lockdown is a memory now. Covid is not what it was. But the way I watch wrestling is forever altered. I go back periodically to wrestling for new paintings. I love the aesthetics, and the themes I can manifest through it: the body (in pain, bodies in contact, morphed into hybrid beasts), the spectator vs the spectacle, the archetypes, ethos/pathos/logos.