Michael Haykin: Painting a Pandemic

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.
The Montana-based painter was at work in his Boulder, Montana studio producing paintings which explore time in its various increments 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 as the artist explores world and current events framed by the pandemic.