The Portraits of Color and Shapes, ABC, triptych was shown in De Young Museum Open Exhibition, Fall 2020 in San Francisco.
This series of three triptychs is a response to global, political and social events of spring 2020. I painted them in April and May during the covid19 shelter-in-place in our San Francisco flat. The election campaigns, Black Life Matters, covid19, and the Me Too movement, made me want to respond by expressing what I felt about humanity. I remembered some microscopic black and white portraits of wasps I saw years ago. It was like a yearbook page but they were wasps. I was so struck that each individual wasp had its unique individuality, its wasps-ness and its own personality. Each painting, in these triptychs represents a human individual. The different color shapes represent the person’s different unique individual characteristics. The central light rectangle represents the commonality that we share, our basic humanity. Instead of seeing and treating each other as part of a demographic group, like, as if all wasps are the same, I hope we can connect with our common humanity inside ourselves and use it to communicate with each other in these times.
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The Art of Greg Dunham 