Faces of the Doomed: Artist immortalizes 5,500 shelter dogs by painting each of their portraits before they are put down. Losing a pet is impossibly hard, but if you can channel your loss into something productive, it hurts a little less.
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| Sita was another pit bull mix. They are some of the most common dogs in shelters | . | |
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When painter Mark Barone's dog Santina died three years ago, after 21
years of companionship, he was devastated. But after his partner,
Marina Dervan, suggested that they adopt a new dog from a shelter, both
of their lives transformed in unexpected ways.
"I thought, maybe it would be a great idea to adopt a dog, and Mark
was not interested--he just wasn't ready," Dervan says. "But that didn't
stop me. I was going online and looking at dogs. But instead of finding
a dog, I found out all of the statistics about what was going on in
terms of the amount of animals who were being killed in our shelter
system. And with all of the stats and the imagery that I was looking
at--the gas chambers, and a bunch of pretty awful stuff--I kept sending
this to Mark, saying, 'This is awful.'"
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| Inspired: Kentucky artist Mark Barone spends each day painting doomed
shelter dogs as part of a project to create 5,500 canine portraits
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Barone's first response was that he didn't want to see it, but he
soon changed his tune. "Two days later, he said, 'I have a really clear
vision of what I want to do to solve the problem.'"
Barone's vision was both simple and extremely ambitious: 5,500
shelter dogs are killed every day in the United States, and he wanted to
give that staggering number a face. So Barone committed to painting
5,500 portraits of shelter dogs, using photos of the animals from
shelter websites from around the country. In Barone's work, each dog has
a name. Dervan names the dogs that are listed only with numbers and is
titled with both its name and the date it was killed. The cumulative
effect of looking at all of these portraits is staggering.
Barone is over two years into the project now, and has more than
3,500 portraits completed. Most of the dogs are painted on 12"x 12" wood
panels, broken up by occasional massive 8' x 8' paintings of dogs whose
story Barone feels particularly inspired by.
"The size of the project is half the size of the Sistine Chapel," he
says. "The Sistine Chapel is 11,000 square feet, and this will be 5,500
square feet. If you stack the paintings 10 feet tall, it'll be two
football fields long." Barone says he paints 10 dogs a day, seven days a
week, and the two say that the project, which they've called "An Act of Dog", is a full-time volunteer job for the both of them.
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| Touching: Barone paints the dogs whose stories affect him most deeply on giant canvasses.
Here, he paints a dog named Oreo
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All of which leads to the question: Once the project is complete and
the 5,500 portraits have been painted, what's going to happen to the
work?
Barone and Dervan have ruled out selling the paintings, even in an
attempt to raise money for a shelter. Instead, they intend to partner
with a city or a philanthropist who wants to build a permanent home for
the work, a nonprofit museum that can exist as a sustainable fundraising
and public awareness solution to convert more of America's shelters
into no-kill institutions.
There are still nearly 2,000 dogs to be painted, so there's time for
them to find the exact right fit. Dervan says that they've turned down a
few cities that didn't mesh with their vision for the museum, but for
shelter dogs across the country, time is running out.
At the very least,
Barone's paintings give those animals a face.
Via :: Dan Solomon
Source :: Fast to Create
