We the Disappeared (Ocean of Grief)

2025

36 x 36 x 1.5 inches

Acrylic paint on canvas

Here’s the straight fact: masked men in unmarked vehicles are terrorizing people just trying to live lives. Legal immigrants, illegal immigrants, green card holders and even U.S. citizens have all been targeted, kidnapped, and some even killed. Sometimes the people are deported to countries or prisons without any notification to friends or family. They are literally disappeared.

Thats what spawned this series. For this particular painting, I imagined that feeling of loss. That feeling of not knowing. Both as a victim and as a victim's family, spouse, child, whatever. The grief. The despair. And so I started painting. With my hands. I wanted to feel the paint across the canvas, building up in layers like the silt at the bottom of seas. I piled on layer after layer, feeling the texture build. The fractured surface. As I built those layers, the faces began to emerge. I roughed in some shapes--again, still using my hands. I didn't use brushes for this piece at all. Just body and canvas. I wanted to feel.

I alternated the blues and blacks, pushing some of the faces into obscurity, pulling others to a deep and abiding sadness at the surface. The ones we can see. the ones we can't. I used water, too, soaking the painting's surface and erasing and reforming the faces over and over, in the painting's very creation the act of disappearance and replacement being visited on fellow humans just trying to live their lives.

$900