Rob Adams a Painter's Blog painter's progress

You can only be scared for so long. However long you look at someone you can never tell if they are a seething cauldron of viral death or just looking a bit peaky due to alcohol consumption. This lurgy is invisible though the invisible sink plunger of death just waiting to consign you to a ventilator. We could now go for walks with a friend provided you kept your distance.

The rules got ever more nuanced, you could meet with six other people from 2 households in a garden provided there were no rose beds, if there were rose beds it was only 5 unless two of them were second cousins or wore red wigs. Every jacket pocket or shopping bag seemed to have masks of dubious age and hygiene in them. There was no money anymore you just waved your card gingerly over the reader knowing that if it ever beeped twice it would have taken all your pension and sent it to Russia.

All this to deal with and painting too, it was enough to send a poor old chap barmy. When I first went to art college to learn how to socialise my Mother bought me a wood carving set at an auction. It had been owned by a man who made models for the science museum. He didn’t need it anymore due to being dead so it was in a sale. I have carried this huge heavy box around with me since I was 19 years old. It has seen bedsits, digs, squats, empty derelict hotels, empty derelict mansions, shared houses, flats, maisonettes and country cottages, but it has never really seen use. This seemed the ideal moment to rectify that.

Rather than planning it I just started, after all how hard could it be? I had done carving before in polystyrene using a chainsaw, I had a 3rd class degree in sculpture, so what could go wrong? The bit of wood was about a thousand years old and like iron. It was impossible to hold it still and bash the chisel with a mallet. I bought a proper carving vice, but even that wasn’t strong enough for the mighty blows needed to remove even a splinter. I bought an attachment for my angle grinder that was considerably more of a risk to my well being than any virus, but at least slowly removed material. Three whole weeks later I was done. I could have painted 20 pictures in the same time.

One odd effect the pandemic had on men was Hairiness. Hair has been a problem for me all through my life. First not enough, no beard until I was 30, I made up for this by growing the bit on my head long enough to tuck into the back of my trousers, now there is too much and everywhere. My tonsorial strategy in later life was a cycle of let it grow for 3 months and then cut it all very short. The pandemic extended this to 5 months so I thought I would immortalise the result. Pen, Ink, White and Patience.

At 4ft across this is bigger than I usually paint. People in Dorset live in cottages and old thatched houses that have small walls. They also are mostly in their 80’s and have already filled what walls they have available for art with horse brasses and photos of their many children and grandchildren which demonstrate to visitors their past success and fertility. I used to sell big pictures in London where the walls are bigger and the people with money younger, but here is much harder. Another reason is that my attic is not in any way related to the Tardis and I would run out of space. The view of course of Blandford, I left the camels as well as the swaying palm trees and the limpid pools surrounded by fountains. 48in by 20in.

Not getting out was getting to me… you can tell by the self portraits. Time to get the hell out and paint some landscapes, at least they don’t look back at you. 8in sq.

Not far from my house there are sheep grazing beside the Stour. I considered wearing a mask as you never know, hamsters can get it apparently so why not sheep? The sheep look smugly content because they have never heard of Donald Trump, lucky blighters. Still it keeps the journalists happy they have had a miserable time covering the pandemic as viruses don’t do photo calls or interviews, also there was so much science which is hard to understand and even harder to write about. Hard to sell sheep paintings, not sure why, I have sold nearly every painting of cattle I have ever done. 16in by 8in.

More sheep. I did sell this one, I think they might not have spotted the sheep, or maybe thought they were cows. 14in by 7in.

High summer and people are doing distanced events. This one was probably illegal, but a bit of music cheered everybody up. I painted the event after the event from a phone snap. With a phone you are never without your camera. This creates vast archives of unremarkable moments for people to put up on social media. As a painter I end up with folders marked ‘possible’ to indicate there might be a painting there. When I look at them a month later I can’t work out why I thought that was the case. This was done the same day though so it was all fresh in my head. 12in by 10in.

More summer fun, this was a socially distanced tea party organised by my lovely neighbours. We sat in front of our houses either side of the road, drank tea, ate cake and conversed. I recorded the event for posterity. Due to the regulations at the time I framed them separately. Quite wide but not as tall.

A dead chaffinch that had flown into a window. I had almost finished this and decided to take a break for a coffee. When I came back I found a cat had snuck in and swiped the birdie. 8in by 7in.

Hold on to your hats, there is excitement and thrills in the next episode as we come to terms with new variants, where I open my doors for Arts Weeks letting virus ridden members of the general public traipse through my house.

Just as life was settling down to a pleasant routine of painting, playing music, life drawing and regular calorific meals bolstered by alcohol this had to happen. I live alone and have a slight hermit tendency but total isolation was a bit of a shock. I have always considered myself minimally social, but once actual isolation raised its head I realised that this was not quite true. So could I paint my way through the pandemic? I could give it a go.

Staying home safely away from horribly contagious fellow humans rather reduced the possibilities. Oddly I had never painted my own home despite it being very convenient with coffee making facilities, a handy loo, a fridge with cold beer and a nice comfy sofa for when the stresses of creation grew too much to bear. I set to and painted this to cover the conveniences, there are the paintings, the music, the walking boots, the lure of the garden and the door behind which the handy loo resides. I left out the beer. 16in by 12in.

Springtime. There is an old window with old glass in my old house, so the old man painted it. I don’t often paint flowers, or still lives. Still lives… I have always avoided them but I could see the time had come when I had to bite the bullet. I could convince myself that this one was “all about the light” thus not a proper still life at all. No grapes for a start, everyone knows a still life need fruit and crockery… glass too, just to show how dashed clever you are with the reflections and transparency. 12in sq.

To do a proper still life you have to do a bit of preparation. For a start you need to get your subject decently lit. This means removing all the light then letting it back in bit by bit. Plenty of time so I made myself a black box with sliding sides. Now I could control the light. Bits of shaped white card dropped in to reflect in those shiny surfaces. Fiddle, fiddle to get those shadows falling nicely. What a faff, it takes longer to set up than to paint the damn thing! 10in sq.

I am always vaguely pleased to wake up not dead so I thought I would paint the old window again. Like life it’s just there in the morning and I enjoy the way the sun pours through the wobbly glass. Somehow nicer than the staged still lives, a genuine slice of my world. Old still lives were designed to show how jolly rich you were. Paintings full of food. Paintings full of valuable bits and bobs. Paintings to depress your poorer friends. 12in sq.

We are allowed to go for walks, at first just walks no painting as that makes you especially contagious. Fishing folk have influence in high places and got a special dispensation to sit by themselves outdoors for long periods in order to avoid their families and annoy the fish. I thus felt justified in painting the river. I got told off by a lady who walked several hundred yards to get near enough to castigate me for my selfishness and anti social behaviour. 16in by 12in.

I don’t get this still life thing, but I’d made the bloody box. Not sure how to choose the items, are there rules? Should it be thematic? Is colour harmony the thing? A mystery to me. 10in sq.

No life drawing, I very much missed my life drawing. The only human available is me. Here I am peering down at my laptop taking in the morning news. One morning I was doing just that when the battery ran out and the screen went black. There I was reflected in the black glass with an “Oh shit I’m going to die.” expression on my face. Once plugged back in and my access to the universe daft opinions restored I recreated the moment and snapped it on the web cam.

I had been following with interest the development of the Corona Virus’ image. It had over time developed into a red ball covered with matching red sink plungers. Some news outlets bucked the trend and went for blue others for virulent green. Later on when the variants of concern appeared it went through a phase of a purple ball with red sink plungers. I decided to frame the selfie with viruses but went for the electron microscope version with a hint of sink plunger for good measure. Middle image is 10in sq.

The all important online feedback for the previous selfie wasn’t good… to depressing and the viruses were too decorative and not sufficiently threatening. I took this to mean that underplaying the sink plungers had been an aesthetic error. Oh well. Now a jolly self portrait that was a challenge. I set the mirror up and smirked at it in various ways. Hard to look jolly to order, even harder to look jolly for a couple of hours straight, especially with the plague closing in. I also came to the conclusion that in everyday life when I actually was feeling jolly I tended to look supercilious instead. Much better feedback for this one, a painting of someone pretending to look uplifted was uplifting it would seem. 8in by 10in.

Selfies are much more fun than still lives… The black box is taken apart and relegated to a high shelf where it will be found by the house clearance people after I decease from the dread disease. Here I was setting up a mirror for a selfie and saw myself reflected in my big mirror. The mirror that shows my face is the one in which I get the side on image of me painting. 8in by 10in.

I decide to do one of those proper “I am a Serious Artist” self portraits. Every artist should do one of these as they are handy for the author of your big hard cover Thames and Hudson book that will almost certainly be published after you are cruelly cut down by the virus in your prime. At the very least it might appear in the brief obituary published in the Blackmoor Vale magazine. 16in by 20in.

I love my garden, here it is ready for planting, my house in the distance. This is the view from my studio when I have the doors wide open. Not having access to geraniums for the pots I grow dwarf beans in them instead. 10in sq.

Having done one down the garden it seemed only proper to do on looking up too. 12in by 10in.

That’s the first bit of the pandemic dealt with. The world has taken on a surreal flavour, I don’t speak to another human being for weeks on end. I watch half the world go slowly mad with trying to pretend that reality isn’t real, but invented by malicious child eating tycoons. I look at graphs of people dying in droves. I make masked commando raids on the supermarkets at ungodly hours, only to find them full of other nervous grocery commandos with the same idea. I dream at night of unlimited supplies of Andrex.