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My shadow’s the only one that walks beside me
My shallow heart’s the only thing that’s beating
Sometimes I wish someone out there will find me
Till then I walk alone
— Green Day, Boulevard of Broken Dreams
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At the top is another piece from my Social Distancing show at the Principle Gallery, tentatively scheduled for early June. This painting is called Shelter in Place. The interesting thing about this group of paintings of empty city streets is that most of them were completed well before the imposed isolation began. But the situation has certainly caught up with these pieces.
The scenes of empty streets from around the world that we have seen on our screens in the past month are often haunting. They really capture the feel of this crisis, especially the day to day rhythms of life.
Or lack of rhythm.
I know that this is my biggest takeaway thus far.
I say that this isolation is neither nothing new or daunting for me, as an artist and as someone who would rather be alone for the most part. I have spent over two decades happily alone in my studio. There’s a certain rhythm that I find in this solitude, one that is comforting and nurturing to the creative process.
But that is the rhythm of a self-imposed isolation, more like the feeling of a hermitage or retreat. This feels different. It is more claustrophobic, more imposed from the outside.
More like solitary confinement. The hermit’s cell might not be much different than the cell of a prisoner in solitary in size and adornment but the feel one has in each is distinctly different.
The hermit chooses to be cloistered there and finds ample space in that small cell to wander and explore the vastness of the mind. The prisoner’s experience is set upon them and the closeness of the cell becomes even smaller, more confined. Even the mind seems walled in.
The same setting but with two different situations and two decidedly different rhythms of being.
The current situation of shelter in place seems like an odd mixture of the two, sowing confusion in my role as either hermit or prisoner, which most definitely throws my rhythms out of whack. There are moments of productive peacefulness followed quickly by a high level of anxiety that leaves me listless, almost frozen in place.
Oh, how I long for my hermit’s rhythm to be completely restored…
Anyway, here’s Boulevard of Broken Dreams from Green Day. Seems to match up with the painting.
Hope you find your rhythm. Have a good day.
Redtree Times 