24"x30" acrylic on canvas, 2021
 
This canvas was a personal pandemic piece, an exploration of the theme of endurance. I hold my own positive experience of this time with great awareness, with empathy for dear friends who lost parents, and loved ones everywhere impacted by loss in all the ways. In my corner of the world, there was the medicine of nature, the comfort and routine of regular walks, the unfamiliar and welcome blank squares on our family calendar. In the backdrop, contemplation of personal shifts through not only that year but all the ways I had been practicing endurance for a decade. The practices of breathing and making space - essential to wellbeing - were never more necessary. They sustained and changed me for the better. Never had I seen the sky more blue than it was when planes stopped flying and cars stopped commuting - it was as if the planet was able to return to a sense of homeostasis, the way it used to be, the way I yearned for it to remain. With all of humanity in a collective time-out, we turned to the things that mattered - family, food, rituals of cleaning and moving and reading and resting. Art poured forth in prolific ways - musicians offering livestreams and chanting, artists sharing beauty and poignancy, poets putting words to unfathomable experiences and bringing context to all of our hurt and healing… There was an undigestible amount of content that kept us - content and okay. This piece alludes to the ways we stayed - my partner of thirty years and I collaboratively unraveling our marriage without the children knowing, through sweet holiday seasons and sharing a home all the while. It honors the ways we stayed as a community - mentoring each other through new educational models and physical and financial havoc. It bows to the things that held me up personally - the umber bark of wise trees, the clear open sky, the open space on that calendar. The canvas feels simultaneously urban and rural which is intentional as I held so many city friends in their various apartments leaning out windows at a certain hour against my own good fortune for a spacious yard in a safe neighborhood, repeating my gratitude for the place where we were quarantined to stay.