01.5 – Painting
January 31st, 2011
Shadows
© 2002 Henk Pander
80×142
Private Collection
On November 7, 2001, not quite two months after the attacks on the World Trade Center, Pander was aboard a Frontier Airlines flight to New York to make sketches and photographs of Ground Zero. On the plane he wrote in his journal: “I feel drawn to the subject. It seems to belong to the other themes I have painted over the years–my childhood memories of World War II, the fields around Verdun, the airplane paintings, the New Carissa project. There is a concept I learned long ago in Amsterdam: the only thing one can really do is a paint a picture of your time. I think I might have taken this to mean making documentary paintings of historical events as they more or less affect my life, or to which I am a witness.” Shadows is the largest and most powerful of several oil paintings of the 9/11 site that Pander created in his studio in Portland. He worked from drawings and photographs that he made from a vantage point on the 23rd floor of a building next to Ground Zero.
~ Roger Hull
Professor Emeritus, Art History, Willamette University
Senior Faculty Curator, Hallie Ford Museum of Art
