LIFEnearDEATH Portraits from a Hospice
Artist's Statement
This series of portraits shows the faces of patients living in a hospice.
The patients are of many ages, from early forties to late eighties. They
are dying of various illnesses — stroke, congestive heart disease, emphysema,
cancer, AIDS, alcoholism, drug addiction — and of simple old age. Most of
the people in the portraits are now dead. A few live on bearing the daily
effort of life. Some are vividly aware of their condition, some are in
dementia or wandering the dreamy labyrinth of final days. Some are on the
private, knowing journey through medicated pain. The portraits are meant to
show that life does not surrender itself until the only the final moment; and to
dream that, in a way, no one dies because there is no land between life and death.
There is the ultimate heroism, and then the rest.
|