Michael Haykin: Painting a Pandemic
On view through October 2, 2022
Yellowstone Art Museum
Billings, Montana
www.artmuseum.org
Michael Haykin’s exhibition, “Painting A Pandemic,” takes the viewer on a visual journey into cultural behaviors, world and national events, personal experience, and the powerful effect of the COVID pandemic to magnify and dissect a changing new world.
A Montana-based painter known primarily for his large multi-panel paintings of nature and of natural phenomena, Haykin introduces an extraordinary new body of work in this exhibition. In March 2020, the artist was at work in his Boulder, Montana studio producing paintings which explore time in its various increments; seasons, minutes, and seconds, when the COVID pandemic rapidly emerged. After his first time wearing a mask for safety in public, and feeling awkward and self-conscious, he returned to his studio to make a painting about his experience. This first painting led to a two-year-long exploration of the pandemic’s new world order. The mask image morphs and is replaced by images of natural elements, and the artist explores the world and current events framed by the pandemic.
[Image: Michael Haykin, Mask, 2020, Oil on canvas, 48 x 36 inches.]
