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Although wanting for some time to exhibit these large paintings, based on drawings I had made in late 1963 of a skeletal figure buried in fetal position from its display case at the Carnegie Museum; when offered a show at Garfield Artworks in Pittsburgh for February 2005, I had yet to realize its significance.

"Ashes in the Wind - The Work of Mourning" by sheer accident fell approximately two weeks after the sixtieth anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz that was marked by a commemoration sponsored by the United Nations and some 150 nations to include other acts of violence against humanity.

I, likewise, dedicated the exhibition as a time of reflection about the intolerance that people feel towards others seen as "different". And I had included "Ship of Fools" to signify the similarity in the present adminustration's acts of repressing opposition to its foreign policy and how war systems drag whole populations into violence. When I wrote this announcment to the exhibition I was thinking about the violence erupting in Iraq and elsewhere:

"It is almost impossible not to have the shadow of the Holocaust fall onto any image that I make that depicts vulnerability, loss, or violence against the weak. Now more than ever, sorrow falls on all people. We must mourn not only for the suffering of the innocent, but also for the loss of compassion we feel for anyone different from ourselves."

- Richard Rappaport, Ashes in the Wind - The Work of Mourning, "Portraits & Passages", Chapter 26, www.richard-rappaport.net.