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Sept 11
36" x 36"
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September 11
The Painting : the story
The morning of Sept.11, I went to work as usual, I work in a paper mill in a small lab where I am one of the only one that have a radio.
About half an hour before the tragedy hit the WTC, one of my boss enter the lab and ask me : How are you this mourning.
Usually we always say, even when it’s not true that everything is fine. But this morning I had to say that something was wrong, this is the answer I said to him:
-I don’t feel good this mourning, actually since about 3 months there is a pressure building up inside me, the pressure building up was when I look at people in the eyes. Then I did the gesture as I said , the pressure is so high that I don‘t know if it’s me or something else but it is about to blow! The gesture that I did was like if I was a tower and with my hands I show my head exploding. My boss went back to his office.
Half an hour later the first plane hit, as I am the only one that have a radio, I went to tell everyone, many of them were septic, especially when I came back to tell that an other plane had crashed in the other tower, for myself my legs started shaking, I was weak, the pressure disappear inside me.
At the end of the day, my boss came back and said to me, do you remember what you tell me this morning, I said yes Richard and remember that.
I got problem to explain and understand all that happen but I have a good idea:
On the 19 of October 2000 , my father Jean-Paul Defayette passed away, a very special person, he was very concern by these kind of things. When he was on his bed knowing that the end was nea , I told him:
- Dad, if there is something after death, send me a sign. I am pretty sure that that was it.
As a painter sometimes seen as a visionary I knew that I had to do a painting about it , I started the painting and in the front I did paint atill life. some fruits , jars, butterfly on a table cover this section of the painting took me 70 hours to achieve. When I showed the painting to two persons, they told me that this section did not realy fit with the subject, they were right , I paint over itand did something else , at the end it turns out that it ‘s me looking at the event because I was part of it.
During the time that my father was very sick ,I was painting an other painting (The Madona de the year 2000) , on this particular painting we can see what seems to be the towers collapsing and they are on the top of the babel tower, the meaning of the babel tower where man wanted to build a tower to reach god, and then god did not want that, he sent on humans the language barrier that stopped the construction. Today the WTC towers were the come back of all the language of the earth by use of computers in all aspects of our life.In that painting, there is also Madona herself who publicly criticise the president in a video, the rose is the one that I took from the cemetery on my father grave.
The painting
I also want to say that the real title of the painting is “Apocalypse 4 , September 11” because it is a follow up of a serie of painting that I do depicting life at this point in history, a serie that will go on.
To be continued!