I was working on a drawing my husband simply did not like. He even walked by and in a moment of frustration around the image I was creating said, “I think you should just stop working on this.” Which as every fellow artist knows is just the comment we need to hear to make us WANT to work on it even more. My response to him was to say long after we are dead there will an exhibition of this body of work I am creating and in one of the exhibit rooms there will be this drawing along with a display of the Stereoscopic viewer and case for those future humans to examine. This week for fun I created a mini imagined exhibit and wrote captions as though it was 30 years from now. I can’t help imagining videos accompanying the exhibit of the, empty streets in the early days of lockdown, the overflowing hospitals, BLM protests, and hopefully images of the incompetent and greedy politicians in orange jumpsuits being marched to their incarceration. I still need to work on it but I want to keep working on this fantasy future exhibit if only because it comforts me to think there might be a future with museums and exhibits. I miss museums. I miss the Metropolitan Museum in NYC so much that it hurts when I see their posts on Instagram. Oh to wander that vast museum and come across some new visual delight. I miss our son who lives in NYC who I have not seen in person since this whole pandemic began. I want to hug him so badly.
Last week my mentor/teacher Joel Janowitz had made some interesting comments about this complex still life I had set up with the viewer and case in it. He got me thinking about how I could use it to capture the angst and struggle of this moment in history. Although the drawing as a whole did not work, in my opinion Joel had pointed out drawing elements that had potential and so I was inspired to revisit the idea. I am still not in a place where I feel the idea is working or the drawings are where I want them to be. But the critique group has been inspiring and I am not going to let go of this idea. Everyone’s comments including Joel’s have made me even more eager to return and play with this idea. Stay tuned for more attempts to tackle this still life self portrait!!!
It was a beautiful day. I am not normally tempted to do landscapes but the weather was perfect and I simply could not resist. I headed out and before I had even gone to the spot I was thinking I would work I saw this trash can and how it captured how we are trashing the environment.