IMPRESSIONS
moment as storytelling in
the time of Corona
This body of work translates impressions of moments during the pandemic into expressive mixed media works on paper, acrylic, and wood as well as brief diary entries and poems.
After 2019 as we shifted into the pandemic, my work took a shift to the fleeting, towards invisible forces like wind and nature and the internet. I craved the ephemeral and spiritual- fragile moments in time. I craved something aesthetic that documented and translated the mood. I wanted to jar and encapsulate those moments- the good, the bad, and the beautiful.
I began to layer personal experiences and observations, stories from friends, and dreams into compositions. The materials needed to be gossamer and driven by line like memories themselves that form delicate wrinkles in our mind. I dug up humble charcoal paper or wood boards with a pantina or stained or broken canvases. Found and mixed media materials needed a degree of unreliability and to show signs of unreliability or age. My hand urged translucent ink and layered acrylic or watercolor or glitter or graphite in quick expressive strokes. The forms and subjects tended to vary- reflecting the emotive highs and lows of a tumultuous few years- but always translating those memories or events heavy with movement, layers, and episodic details- often colored by a newfound appreciation of nature.
Like the pandemic moment itself, I wanted something momentary and unstable. The resultant series known simply as “impressions” are those observations taken from 2019-2022. Moments of beauty, of the mundane, and magical impressions of the present. The works journey form points of fear to quiet aloneness to the slow easing into a joy to just be present in moments of normalcy.
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Sometimes it’s hard to place the atmosphere right now.
Sometimes it’s hard to place the atmosphere right now.
An unsettling stillness?
An anxious calm?
Fear?
Fear yes, but also apprehension
for what may yet come.
does it also feel to you like we are all floating? floating in muffled water or air?
...a few of us are clustered together but, most of us are six feet apart...
in our own clouds.....
....till distancing ends.
The city has never felt so quiet and empty. On long evening walks through the neighborhoods of the District, I feel life. I see people.
But both are muted behind windows and masks. With the dampening effects of rain an unexpected winter chills the last month, I feel enveloped by a soft washed out silence.
When I first started this painting in early February,
I wasn’t sure why I was making what I was making yet.
I knew it was darkness.
Darkness but alive and terrible and wondrous creeping across
the horizon.
Anthropomorphic, secret, and sinister.
Flat.
All contrast.
Without nuance.
Now, deep in Coronatime.
I feel like that invisible creature is suddenly real and relevant.
Made this slowly over the winter. A line one weekend, a dab of paint or sketch a day later.
It came into focus
as if slowly waking from a dream.
Now a month under quarantine that old life feels just as soft distant & dreamlike. *
The days keep blurring together....
Morning time, or before we got there.
The movement of dim dark when, in bleary eyed sleeplessness, we witnesses the night birds awakening. It’s early dawn or late late night. Dreams mingle with reality in a magic and nightmare chorus.
It was a windy winter spring
I’ve always found comfort
in the movement
of birds.
To Another Brother the World
Distant not joyless.
Alone but connected.
We have never been able to touch the spring sky.
And yet even far away it can still bring us to life.
Is that a star in the sky?
A meteor falling to earth?
Are we opening up to something hopeful and new
or watching an impending apocalypse?
My creative works lately keep moving between
minimalism and overly layered.
'
Empty streets and crowded homes.
Silent cities and busy ethernets.
Color and Pattern and that Heavy Wind the Other Day
New Moon Time.
Coronatime.
A Neko Case Song
for Company.
The wind blew that day,
cool against the ruddy spring air.
I guess I didn’t realize
a brief second winter
was only a few weeks
away
Sending pandemic shells
to the wind.
Heady summer nights.
Drinks under the moon.
Cicadas.
The three ghosts continue to haunt the place.
We escaped them to the Blue Ridge Mountains.
Fireworks.
Roof decks.
Sailboat on the Bay.
A warm
blue day.
Laotian food.
A chance encounter with a friend and her dog in Adams Morgan.
Kismet.
A sad love story separated by a plane flight and an ocean.
Turkey roaster time machines and golden bridges.
Ashes and P.O. Boxes, vases and visitations...
Time rushing forward and upwards.
anyone else feeling overwhelmed?
What's Next?
