There are moments in your life when you see something, and you just know you have to paint it. It happened in New York, when I saw a postal worker pushing a cart full of Amazon boxes across 9th Ave. That moment led to Fanfare for the Mailman, an award-winning work from 2020. I was likewise inspired to create this painting.

Light and Enlightenment at Cafe Baudelaire reflects a moment of quiet concern of a mother for her daughter. Finding beauty in a time of crisis can be a challenge, and this is meant to be a challenging work: It’s a cityscape / landscape, a double-portrait and a still life, all on one canvas.

This is my first-ever double portrait of my wife and daughter. It captures a random moment of real life—but it’s loaded with deeper meaning: A young woman is on her phone, seemingly captive like a bird in a cage. She refuses to share what’s troubling her with her masked, anxious mother, who is standing guard. The freedom and challenge of college awaits. It’s based on an image I took October 4, 2020, during my daughter’s first semester at Iowa State University. My wife and daughter are in shadow, while their destination glows in the fall sunshine beyond.

My wife is a strikingly unapologetic ‘helicopter mom’. Sending our only daughter off to college in the middle of a pandemic was undeniably stressful. It was also stressful for our daughter, and that stress manifests itself in many ways.

Now imagine that stress multiplied by millions, and you get a sense of what life was like for people in 2020, not only for Americans but for everyone around the world.

I admit that I broke all kinds of rules in creating this work. The composition is troubling and out-of-balance. The subjects are looking off the edge of the painting, not into the painting. The very elements of the painting seem socially distanced. I enhanced the colors greatly, and I bent the perspective to suit my taste (I also shot the reference photo in panorama mode, which gave me that interesting, bent perspective). But I wanted to stay true to what I saw and felt on that achingly beautiful fall day.

There is something else I am trying to say in this work. I believe people have the ability to see the world differently when our very existence is in doubt. We notice the things around us that we usually take for granted. The air smells sweeter, the sky is bluer and the sun feels just a little bit warmer on our face (and it’s not just due to climate change). We become aware of our own mortality—and we want to soak up life like a sponge, because tomorrow is never guaranteed.

That is why I felt it was important to show you everything that I could in this work—the entirety of Friley Hall in the background, which represents the future—the trees in their fall colors, and that lemon sunlight, filtered through the shadows of trees on Lincoln Way.

It was also important to show the opening in the metal fence on the far right of the composition, revealing that our young subject is not really captive. There is almost always a way out.

The American artist Edward Hopper believed that a nation's art is greatest when it most reflects the character of its people. In this work, I am trying to capture the character of Americans in the age of Covid, and how we as individuals handled the stress of a global pandemic. It may also be seen as a subtle critique of technology, the modern world, and life in the 21st century.

Ironically, it was Charles Baudelaire—the poet who invented the term ‘modernity’—who believed it is the responsibility of the artist to capture the fleeting, ephemeral experience of life in an urban metropolis. So in the spirit of Baudelaire, I’m glad I was able to capture this moment in time, showing a worried mother, a troubled daughter, and our hopes for her future—as resplendent as that midday sun.