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.
First of all, welcome back! (is that the right thing to say? Anyway, I’m very pleased to be receiving your blogs again).
The lockdowns had a strangely stifling affect on me. We moved to a small village in South Somerset from Carshalton in S. London about four and a half years ago. I was already struggling to find new subjects, having been used to painting towns and suburbs, and the pandemic more or less froze my artistic output for about two years. I couldn’t concentrate, I wasn’t inspired, somehow painting lost it’s relevance. We isolated ourselves pretty thoroughly as my wife is classified as ‘vulnerable’. She also paints (another ex-graphic designer!) and she had the same experience as me, in fact she’s hardly painted since. One or two artists I spoke to at the Somerset Open Studios last year also recounted a similar thing. I can’t explain it. It was frustrating, all that time when we couldn’t do much else and I just couldn’t make it work. And yes, I also did a still life (which I never normally do). Yes, fruit, pottery, glass, flowers. It was ok but not exactly exciting. I did like your painting of the old window, though, that’s the way to tackle a still life.
Comment by Martin Harris — March 12, 2022 @ 3:23 pm
Hi Martin, glad you approve of my tardy return. I think more people reacted like you than reacted like did. Living on you own makes a difference, I really did have to paint to stay sane. I have neighbours who still are in full pandemic mode, still washing their shopping and avoiding everyone as if they cannot put in behind them.
Comment by Rob Adams — March 12, 2022 @ 4:09 pm
Annoying about the bedding plants, wasn’t it? I eventually got some rather violently coloured geraniums from the rack outside the CoOp.
I couldn’t work out from your tone whether you were a true believer or just a rule observer. I certainly resented losing the best part of two years of my increasingly short life expectation to whatever it was. Since we had just moved to a new house, and I had brought all the various half used pots of emulsion from the previous garage ( too mean to throw them out) we now have a variety of interesting painted rooms ( Pompeii dining room, cathedral masonry hall) to show for our cancelled outings.
The teller off was a prize , wasn’t she. I expect she wore a mask in her car when she was driving on her own…..
Comment by Niobe — March 13, 2022 @ 12:09 pm
It is very different being on your own, and it must have been tough for you. I don’t know if I would have coped, I got pretty depressed as it was. I think perhaps having someone else to be concerned about helped.
We are not washing our food, but I can sympathise with your neighbours. It hasn’t gone away, in fact the case numbers were up last week, and people are frightened.
Anyway, I now have something to take my mind off it and to provide some motivation, as I’ve been offered a solo exhibition in Crewkerne Museum in May. Nothing like the fear of a blank wall to get me painting.
Comment by Martin Harris — March 13, 2022 @ 1:39 pm
Niobe, I do not do belief, the thing with science is that belief is not a requirement. This whole period had shown that most people still have an essentially superstitious view of the world. They happily accept flawed evidence if it fits how they would emotionally like things to be. I had friends who believed the whole thing was a put up job. Even when it was explained to them that such an extended conspiracy would be impossible to organise, let alone keep secret, they still preferred the more emotionally satisfying interpretation. People talk of science as if it is optional to believe it or not rather like religion. This shows how poorly science is taught in schools. Science is not a belief system but a means of testing and grading belief. All human thought depends on belief, what science adds is degrees of believability, a way of grading ideas into more or less probable rather than the simple it’s true or not.
Comment by Rob Adams — March 13, 2022 @ 2:53 pm
of course you are right about science, after all, it just means knowledge. The problem is that it is interpreted by scientists, who are fallible human beings like the rest of us.
Comment by Niobe — March 14, 2022 @ 9:03 am
I don’t want to offend, but saying that “science is knowledge” is a pretty good illustration of misunderstanding what science is. I do not blame people for misunderstanding, scientists have not been able to resist boosting their egos by posing as all knowing druids. Science is not knowledge or truth, but a method of testing the validity of presumed knowledge. The press, politicians and even scientists tend to present scientific findings as holy writ, which just illustrates as you say how fallible all humans are. Nothing in science is fixed, any premiss is only as good as the evidence to support it. During the early parts of the pandemic the government was saying, ‘follow the science’ but how could they, when there wasn’t any data yet. The excellent data they had from the Spanish flu in America was ignored as it did not say things that people wanted to hear.
Comment by Rob Adams — March 14, 2022 @ 10:08 am