On Medium and Method

The paintings represented here are 5x7” and painted in gouache, which is an opaque water-based paint, like tempera, like the kind of paint we used in elementary school. In the 1980s, at the Oakland Museum, I saw a retrospective of the work of African American artist Jacob Lawrence, which showed me the expressive potential of this medium.

With the exception of two paintings that are based on still photographs, all works are based on screenshots I captured from video files or camera-phone shots of the television screen.

When you look at a photograph, it is very easy to dive into its illusion and forget that it is an abstraction of reality. Gouache is the opposite. It is always reminding you that it is paint on paper and not its subject. It has an insistent matte surface and hard edges, and its opacity is difficult to dilute away. I like working with these qualities, developing my own means, through color, line, shape, and gesture, to communicate my understanding of the subject.

There is no uniform painting technique throughout the series; for example, the portrait of Henry Louis Gates, Jr. is minutely detailed while the portrait of Jonathan Capehart is more simply rendered, the face quickly drawn in a single dilute layer. These choices were intuitive and based on an attitude of experimentation.

Notes and Thanks

The conviction on April 20th of Derek Chauvin for the murder of George Floyd was an important yet early milestone in the struggle for Black victims of unlawful police violence. As Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison stated, the guilty verdict marks a rare instance of accountability, and the American people together must continue to work towards justice under the law for all.

I have learned that, last June 10th, the Louisville city council voted unanimously to ban no-knock search warrants. Called Breonna's Law, it requires all officers who serve warrants to wear body cameras and have them turned on from at least five minutes before the warrant is served to at least five minutes after. On January 6, 2021, the Louisville Metropolitan Police Department dismissed two detectives, one who had fired multiple rounds indiscriminately in Breonna's apartment and who shot and killed her, and the other, who misled a judge to obtain the no-knock warrant to arrest Breonna’s former boyfriend at her home without verifying that he still lived with her. A third officer was fired last year after a grand jury indicted him for endangering the lives of Breonna's neighbors.

I want to thank the people in these pages whose words helped me better understand the experiences of Black Americans. During these last seven months, doing this work while living at home during the pandemic, I heard them through online sources, on broadcast television, and by reading. I am thankful for the Public Broadcasting Service and the PBS Newshour, in particular, which brought to me so many of these voices speaking on a range of issues.

Studying and painting these portraits gave me the time to feel more deeply what the people were saying, to empathize. So many of them communicate belief in the rule of law and in the Constitutional proposition of forming "a more perfect union". In these scary political times in the United States, in which our democracy seems very fragile, their commitment encourages and inspires. I think that this is what the one unidentified subject, the “Man in Philadelphia”, means when he says, “Black people, once again, are going to save this country.”

I want to express my appreciation for having had the privilege of a career teaching art and photography at Westmoor High School in Daly City, California.

I want to thank Martin Friedman and Felicia Savage Friedman, whose dedication to anti-racism education helped me understand that this work is personal to me.

Finally, I want to thank John, whose love changed my life.

Emily Faxon
May 14, 2021