Here’s the link to a little article about my current project:
https://www.pressdemocrat.com/lifestyle/10918354-181/painter-honors-everyday-heroes-of?artslide=7&sba=AAS
THE PRESS DEMOCRAT
April 30, 2020, 8:13AM
We’ve all seen paintings of heroes — generals on horseback, soldiers in battle raising the flag — but how often have you seen an ambulance driver or a letter carrier exalted through portraiture? Not often. John Deckert decided to do something about that.
Deckert, 72, has a long history as a professional artist. For 20 years, he lived in New York City. He came to live in Mill Valley in 2003 before settling in Santa Rosa’s Rincon Valley three years ago, and he has continued to show his work, most recently in an exhibit that opened in Berkeley early last month.
He always has done both portraits and landscapes, but lately, he’s been focused on a much more specific series of paintings.
During the statewide shelter-in-place order, Deckert has been taking photos of people who must continue to work despite the coronavirus pandemic — a landscaping crew, EMTs in an ambulance, a PG&E repair crew, a tree trimming crew, the UPS delivery driver — and then painting oil portraits of them, ranging in size from 5 by 7 inches to 16 by 20 inches.
“I’ll ask the people coming to do tree trimming or lawn care,” Deckert said, “and I’ll approach them to take their picture.”
He’s posted the work online, at johndeckert.com/pandemic, where you can see it.
One of his subjects is mailman Ronald Crawley, who has known Deckert for several years.
“I first met John about three years ago as his new mail carrier. After a couple of years, I deduced that he was an artist, and one day I asked him questions about how he got started. He sent me email photos of some of his past work, and I was impressed with his talent,” Crawley said.
“Then one day a couple of weeks ago, he photographed me at his mailbox and told me he was doing paintings of people still doing their jobs during the coronavirus. People think we’re heroes, or something special, but I am just grateful to still be working, although I will be retiring at the end of this month,” he added. “I think his project is pretty cool, something that will be remembered for a long time to come.”
Deckert started with the people who showed up near his house. Some of them he already knew. Then he expanded his territory.
“Just today I received selfies of 12 ER nurses at Santa Rosa Memorial Hospital,” he cheerfully announced one recent Sunday afternoon. “So, there’s a lot more work I have to do on this project.”
This isn’t Deckert’s first effort to honor those still at work while the rest of us seek safety.
“In 2017, after the wildfires, people were putting signs on fences, saying ‘thank you’ to the first responders,” Deckert said. “I’m a painter, so my way of saying thanks is to do a painting.”
With that project, Deckert worked from photographs to paint portraits he then gave to his subjects, including Santa Rosa Fire Chief Anthony Gossner, as well as the commanding officer of the local National Guard unit, the ranger at Sugarloaf Ridge State Park and the head nurse in the emergency room on the night shift at Santa Rosa Memorial Hospital, among others.
His focus during the coronavirus pandemic is a bit different than it was after the 2017 wildfires.
“The pandemic has switched things around,” Deckert said. “During the fires, the attention was on the leaders. During the pandemic, when most people are inside, some people are still working, and they’re the real heroes.”
As Deckert began to produce portraits of essential workers during the pandemic, he planned to give the paintings to the people they portrayed, as he had done before. But his plans changed when an new opportunity arose.
Now he expects to show his work as part of a larger traveling exhibit, once the stay-home orders are lifted, featuring 60 similar works by some 30 artists nationwide, some of them top magazine illustrators.
Deckert is a longtime Marine reservist, and his work will be part of the new “Emergent Warriors Artwork” effort to honor essential workers. That effort is led by Michael Fay, a retired official artist for the Marine Corps who now lives in Lancaster County in Pennsylvania, and Deckert has been involved from the start.
“I want to take this on the road. This will be international eventually,” Fay said about the new portrait effort. Deckert previously participated in Fay’s Joe Bonham Project, devoted to portraits of wounded veterans and named for the maimed hero of the 1938 anti-war novel “Johnny Got His Gun” by American novelist and later blacklisted screenwriter Dalton Trumbo.
“John’s art is wonderful,” Fay said of Deckert. “He’s just an incredible painter.”
There are 35 of Deckert’s paintings in the permanent collection of the National Museum of the Marine Corps in Quantico, Virginia. The work by Deckert and others in that collection demonstrates the lasting power of traditional realistic paintings, Fay said.
“Illustration has a lot narrative content,” he explained. “It’s all about storytelling. It’s interesting how people open up to it.”
You can reach staff writer Dan Taylor at dan.taylor@pressdemocrat.com.