The Pandemic Lens^®

A year ago, my husband and I were preparing to move from Massachusetts to Maine. I was organizing my painting studio in preparation for closing it, visiting with friends for holiday parties, and finalizing last-minute details for my daughter’s wedding. It all seems a very long time ago.

Now, settling into our new home near Casco Bay, we find ourselves—like so many sequestered—looking out of windows, a lot. Our immediate environment is rural, abuts the sea. Small time for us is counted in 24-hour-and-50-minute cycles, a lunar day, which includes two sets of rising and falling tides. Bigger time, days and seasons, passes and can be noted by the changes in light and pairs, flocks, gaggles and clouds of aquatic fowl. Intrigued by our feathered friends’ activity, we began viewing them with binoculars and monocular spotting scopes.

 

 

Looking through windows and lenses, and rambling about the coast, inspired these paintings made during the past year. Watching the birds, learning their names and those of plants and trees in my new surroundings, were refreshing things on which to focus. They were my respite from the endlessly streaming and nerve-wracking news; they helped pass the time away from family and friends.

 

 

 

Recently we acquired a telescope and began learning about really big time. With light traveling at 186,000 mi/sec we view Vega, which according my cursory search on the web, is 25 light years away and at 50,000 miles an hour, would take 117,600,000 years to reach. It gives one perspective. We are living in an infinitesimal period of time. As my late father, who lived during the Great Depression, used to say, “This too shall pass.”

 

 

Copyright © 2020 Joanne Tarlin