MAY, SEPTEMBER & NOVEMBER are still available. The others have sold.

“Soon after the pandemic emerged, I began considering various ways to grapple with the sudden and dire situation at hand. After mucking around in the studio those first hazy weeks, this project initially took shape on April 1st—coinciding with April fools day, which I can’t help but associate with the current president and his mishandling of the Covid crisis. The starting point for this series was my collection of historic pieces of timber, mostly dating between 140 and 230 years old. Many of them come from our property—a two-hundred-year-old dairy farm in Cummington, MA. In thinking about how to personally and creatively deal with the pandemic, I decided to paint a stripe around one of these timbers, and I just kept going, painting one stripe each day. The days turned into a month, and at the end of that first month, I concluded that timber and started fresh with a new one. So each timber represents a one-month duration of the pandemic, and I will continue the project for one full year, ending with twelve painted timbers.

“Painting each stripe a different color and a different width has become a daily meditative exercise that marks each day as time passes during this strange, difficult period. The stripes are not pre-determined; I select the color and the width of each band as I’m painting it. I intuitively respond to my mood and the previous stripes for each subsequent band of color. In doing so, they reflect the idea of marking time; much the way prisoners draw hash marks on the walls of their cell. This parallel resonates with our individual but collective experience of the ongoing lockdowns and social restrictions. The bands also are reminiscent of the stripes on convicts’ uniforms found in pictures of chain gangs—referencing both the history of oppression experienced by Black Americans and the shameful continuation of racial injustice in America today.

“Another vein of work within this “stripes” series are pieces incorporating older hand tools that I paint with scale-appropriate colored bands. In this body of work, the bands of color are symbolic of time and the repetition of manual labor.”

Larry Slezak October, 2020

Larry Slezak has exhibited in dozens of exhibitions around the world for almost 50 years, and taught art from 1972 - 2009. His work is in a number of Institutional and Private collections.