The Pandemic Lens^®

There’s a dead branch on a juniper bush along the edge of the sea,
above the shale gray rocks that at low tide,
the golden green sea weeds collapse upon.

Since I’m an intuitive abstract artist, I don’t start with a plan. I just paint and see what comes out. I found painting during this pandemic to be strangely difficult at times, and at other times I was surprised with the results. I feel the lockdown gave me a way to dive deeper into painting…

Since late March 2020, as the unprecedented lockdown/quarantine took effect across the Northeast USA, which has been my home for the past 30 years, I decided to visually document this historic and unparalleled moment in time through a daily journaling project.     These daily 10-15 minute sketches evolved into The Virus Series. These images…

It was July 31 and the highlight of our day, the evening walk. We serendipitously stumbled upon a live chamber music concert by the troupe Mistral in a local park. There in the center of the park, masked and distanced, the seven or so musicians played to an equally masked and distanced crowd. We delighted…

A few weeks after lockdown started I made arrangements to vacation on Plum Island on Cape Ann in Massachusetts for two weeks. It was March; surely by July the lockdown would be over and I would go paint on the beach and eat ice cream and lobster rolls, lots of lobster rolls. Lockdown wasn’t over,…

It was a curious juxtaposition. It was late April, the height of the Coronavirus outbreak in the Boston area where I live. The news was dreadful daily, increasing numbers of cases, hospitalizations, deaths. But all around, spring was blooming like never before. My 91-year-old mom remarked on it daily, never having seen this season with…

In an earlier post (Waiting for This to End: My “Pandemic days” Project), I mentioned how at the beginning of the pandemic creating new art felt superfluous and I was stuck. I wondered what the role of an artist should be during a crisis as extraordinary as the one we were, and still are, living…

It was mid March and the concern that the world would face a serious pandemic had turned from “a possibility” into an undeniable “reality.” My trip to Ireland for an advanced cold wax painting workshop got cancelled. In a matter of days, we went into complete shutdown. I started painting even more! I had completed…

Bill Oakes, my late husband, would have had a lot to say about the pandemic and the role of artists in helping people to process what COVID 19 has wrought on our collective psyche. Here are two examples of his work that are relevant to current times. Bill painted “Ps 91:1” (the original 911 call)…

In late March, I went for a long walk at the Mass Audubon Broadmoor Wildlife Sanctuary in Natick. Throughout the winter, I had found myself particularly focused on the only green growth to behold, the pines. I had never been so visually arrested by them in the past, and looking back, perhaps I had taken…