This piece was begun in February, during the first four weeks of the European pandemic, as I was with my family in London, while Italy was shut down. The studio in which I was painting is located in a specific area of London, Westminster, that has quite a number of northern Italians, and we all hung out side by side in the cafés. As head of my family, I wondered how I was going to navigate all of this, ensuring my wife and sons would be safe. It felt like a slow motion suspense film... who was going to get the virus next? Italy just shut down, so when were they going to shut down England? Would we be able to return home? Did we want to return home?

My painting was already well along, and the sky beyond the window was uniformly grey, as London winters tend to go. On one of these days, I was walking with my sons in a cemetery that was also a park, and I passed many small tombstones, reading about children that had died during the plagues that ravaged England in centuries past. As I made my way along the paths, the February sky was so bleak it was hard to look up. And then something surprising happened. The dark grey clouds parted slightly and a sliver of gold illuminated a small corner of the cloud bank. I’ll never forget how precious that small, golden color was to me, in that hour. My heart flooded with hope. My life was in God’s hands, my family was here for a reason, and even my pain was authored by One who cares for me deeply.

Thinking of the word chiaroscuro, in Caravaggio’s hands, I realized that the more abysmal the “scuro”, the more it could potentially serve to heighten the “chiaro”. Great composers know this with music, and they use minor chords to give us the major lift, like Rachmaninoff’s Piano Concerto Number 2 in C Minor, Adagio.

I watched as the clouds shifted and sealed the hole in their covering, and the light disappeared. But I saw what I needed to see that day and raced back to my painting studio, and placed a fat impasto of flake white, touched with Naples yellow, on the corner of the cloud. As Emily Dickinson wrote, “‘Hope’ is the thing with feathers - That perches in the soul - And sings the tune without the words - And never stops - at all.

Here is a free link Lang Lang’s performance of Rachmaninoff, that I listened to while painting this piece.