How lucky we were to have just got back from two sweet trips when the pandemic locked us all in our bubbles. My husband and I had visited the Harvard Art Museum with a friend who had moved to Boston last year. This was followed by a weekend in Mystic Connecticut where we caught the outstanding JMW Turner exhibition. A couple of weeks on we got to Chicago for a conference he attended while I wandered around the art museums there. The news of Coronavirus was starting to break, and from then on it was one cancellation after another. My open studies classes at MICA were cancelled and so were all our travel plans for the year.  

 

Amazingly, everyone including myself, adjusted to new realities and my classes moved online during the summer. Even as a tech impaired boomer I became familiar with Zoom and even learned how to photograph my work, air-drop it from the phone to the computer and load my homework assignments into the right folder.  I kept on making art and taking classes even as my rented studio became essentially off limits. The easel moved from room to room as I painted still life, interior scenes and even a few portraits of my household members. The trees and shrubs I could see from my windows called out to me and the arrival of flowers and a gift of toilet paper made interesting subjects. Painting was my antidote to isolation.

 

But it was plein aire (outdoor painting) that made life finally feel normal and hopeful again. At first it seemed impossible that we could have an online class on outdoor painting but after downloading zoom to my phone that miracle actually happened and I was painting in Ellicott City and zooming back and forth with my painting buddies and our instructor who had easels set up in Baltimore parks and alleys or in their own backyards.  On a rainy evening, I painted from our garage with my daughter’s van parked outside making interesting reflections, then on a mild spring day it was on to a little pond in our neighborhood. I started a portrait of our house that probably will never see the light of day and tackled a few other projects in nearby places with classmates and buddies with social distancing and mask wearing. My Fall classes have ended, but privately taught workshops have continued to be blessed with clement weather so fingers crossed for a few more before winter closes in. I’m not bothered by cold but wind and rain are unpleasant so I draw the line there.

 

 So, as the season for outdoor painting draws to a close it will be back to moving my easel around the house until this crisis ends. I took the opportunity to build myself an art website in the last few weeks and I regard it as a new window on the world. I hope to find new ways of connecting safely and helping my art business to thrive.

 

I hope you will follow along on this adventure.

 

Katherine Farrell

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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