A few months after the attack on the World Trade Center, I came across a pile of discarded art supplies on the street near my NYC apartment. There was a variety of small, poorly stretched canvases, some blank, some splattered with paint, and four large wooden painting stretchers (66 X 66”), without canvas. I decided to take them home not knowing how I would use them. A few years later, I decided to paint about the events of 9-11 on the small canvases. A decade later, I decided to stretch canvas onto the larger frames and make paintings, not directly about September 11th but influenced by that event; naming the series “Both Sides of the River”. At the time, I had been researching past civilizations for another painting series and the realization that our Western civilization would also decline with time, became the idea behind this new series. I used aerial views of Manhattan contrasted with images of a past civilization and placed a river between them.
