3 canvases
20” x 24” each
acrylic
2001

In the aftermath of September 11, there was, for me, only one choice about what kind of painting to make: It would emanate from my deep anger and sorrow.

Color was the first thing I considered. I felt compelled to paint darkness and, after that, an intense red. The dark color is rendered along the spectrum from black to green. The red isn’t just a pure red; it is, at times, rose, crimson, even a sort of pink. As I worked I noticed the remaining white area on the canvas, and I chose to leave it as a kind of floating white space with some color worked into it.

The words followed. Lines from Psalm 23 had been repeating themselves in my mind ever since the event, and I painted them onto the first panel. (Each panel contains lines from that psalm.) I had been reading news materials, and I wove in something I read about the chaplain who died giving Last Rites to a fireman.

The middle panel contains a description of the inferno. I was steered to literary sources, too; thus the lines from Allen Ginsberg’s great Beat poem, Howl.

My source for the third panel was the ongoing series in The New York Times, “A Nation Challenged: Portraits of Grief.” These short biographies make each person real. I strung lines from many of the stories—selecting specific qualities, incidents—into a kind of single narrative. In doing so, I, like many others, try to ensure that those who died are remembered as individuals and not as abstractions.