Emptiness, Isolation and Complexity
FuCovid Series 2: A further reflection on the covid 19 pandemic
This series is a continuation of my reflection on the pandemic and supplements the initial “Chaos versus Order” series.
Several of these new pieces focus on the emptiness and isolation wrought by the pandemic.
The pandemic has emptied schools, colleges, churches, bars, hotels, movie theaters, restaurants, stores, weddings, graduations, and birthday parties. It has emptied our lives.
The virus confined us to our homes and isolated us from one another and disrupted (permanently?) how we used to live our lives.
We stayed home, and our home became our office, our children’s school, and our new favorite local restaurant.
Several paintings use negative space to create bubbles and cells to illustrate the isolation. There is plenty going on in these paintings, but the activities are isolated from one another, each bubble separated from the others.
Other pieces focus on the added complexity of our lives as we deal with the pandemic.
What used to be normal every day, simple, spur of the moment activities got more complicated. We had to account for the danger to our health, safety and well-being just to go to the grocery store. Our personal freedom was under siege. Our nerves are frayed.
This complexity is represented by the pieces that use only a few simple colors, but when they intertwine, simple colors give way to a chaotic assortment of shapes, boundaries and new colors. A new and unwelcome reality.