I don't know about you but making art has been a challenge for the past couple of months. However, I am working again and it feels very good.

Let's see: I'm not telling you anything you don't already know but Caronavirus 19 has killed almost 91,000 people in the US alone. Staggering.

On a more personal note, my older sister died in February, just before all this took place. Looking back at her death it seems like a kindness she went when she did. My daughter, granddaughter, two dogs, and I have left our two apartments and are now living together in a new home in Acton, MA; me in an apartment over the garage and them in the main house across an atrium. Moving during this pandemic has been difficult but we are healthy and happy with a large backyard, spring is sprouting up all around us, there are many boxes to unpack, yard work to do, lawn to mow, on and on.

I wrote earlier about the Mannequins work, here. Back when things were moving faster and I had much to do, the Mannequin pictures got left behind, as shows loomed and a new book was in design. But since my forced "retirement" the past two months, it is this work that has been on my mind. So, for no reason other than needing to get work printed and seen, I have been working on the Mannequin project.

Let me state at the outset, that all the old rules no longer apply. I'll explain. I was taught that there were protocols and systems for the presentation of photographs as art. This was art at the highest of levels, to be shown and collected in the best museums. Work that raised the level of consciousness of the medium of photography to new heights. Stieglitz, Walker Evans, Bernice Abbott, Robert Frank, Diane Arbus, Friedlander and Winogrand, Atget, Cartier-Bresson, Callahan Siskind, to name a few. Usually, a small photograph, most often in black and white, mounted on museum board with an over matt in a simple black frame or stacked in a portfolio. But with digital tools coming online earlier this century all this started to break down. 43 inch print with white surround and pink background? Sure, easy. An image as a poster?

Those old rules were valid at a time when photography itself still was relatively new, discoveries in photographic imagery were frequent and exciting. Now we have far more maturity, there is really little that presents as "never seen before". Yes, even true when digital is added in. So, therefore freedoms unheard of just a few years ago are prevalent now. As they should be.

The two mannequin pictures above are now being mounted and will hang on either side of a large TV in my new place. What a pleasure. A new place to live and a blank slate for an artist to make and show his art. All while social distancing and trying his damndest not to get sick.

BTW: I will be speaking this Thursday, May 21at 5 pm about my Monsters work for the Gallery Upstairs, sponsored by Bob Korn Imaging on the Cape.