My love goes out to everyone. The Coronavirus crisis means we are all facing different, challenging and new degrees of separation. Countries. Cities. Partners. Parents and grandparents. Children. Siblings. Friends. Colleagues. Routines. Pastimes. Income. Basic supplies. Travel. Touch. Freedom. Control. Everything we took for granted.
I am with my 87 year old dad, and I’m glad and grateful that I’m with him at home. But last Saturday, being forced to choose between people and lands and ways of life still kind of broke my heart in two. I think I was in shock, probably like many of us.
My sister visited on Sunday, maybe for the last time for who knows how long, and we walked in Attingham Park. We stood on a bridge, a metre apart, and photographed our shadows shifting on the river’s surface. I saw spring buds on the trees, watched a herd of deer graze on green, and my skin warmed in the sunlight. The fact that nature is always changing gave me hope that things will eventually transform.
That night (the 15th March 2020) I decided that for every day that I am ‘here’ when I was expecting to be ‘there’ I will make an iPad painting of whatever wants to channel through me just before I go to sleep. I’m not a person to deny or suppress my feelings in the face of anything. I’ve learned I must let them ebb and flow, observe them, help them to evolve. My paintings are one way I can do it. Two weeks ago I visited the David Hockney: Drawing from life exhibition at the NPG in London. Seeing his iPad drawings was inspiration for this project. Tech-painting will be a new skill for me to learn and the works will be a visual record of this C-19 time and how one 57 year old human being living with an 87 year old human being in the United Kingdom, but separated from loved ones 7000+ miles away, handles it.
The paintings will be an honest expression. They’ll be just as they want to be in the moment, in the early hours when I might otherwise have been heading out on a motorbike to dance Argentine tango or ‘rock and roll’. Really I’ve no idea what will emerge, but curiosity and exploration and adventure are me, so we’ll see.
I’ll share the the paintings because maybe they will help someone else. I’ll put them on Instagram as I make them. The old me might have wanted to plan to perfection before I started sharing anything, but the COVID-19-crisis-facing Sal says, go with whatever runs free and alive in you. And, creative expression is, for now at least, one of the few freedoms I feel we have left. So, I’ll just start and figure out the details later. My wish is that the focus on and output from this project alchemises into healing energy for the Universe and for us all.
The first three drawings are at the top of this blog post.
Take care dear friends.
SAL
#thejoyexperiments #salchemy #C19_degreesofseparation
The paintings will be made on an Apple iPad Air (3rd generation) with an Apple Pencil (1st generation). I’m using the Art Set 4 app.
I’ll be super-happy if you share my creations. Please use short quotes from the piece if you like, but always always link back to this page.
For any other use, please ask me first.
Share art, share <3.
© Sally Townsend Blake 2020
