graphite on panel $700
“The first weeks of the COVID-19 lockdown seemed like honestly
an amazing thing. Look, people at home with their families and kids,
forced to deal with ourselves, not driven by money
and chronic over-busyness!
Look, the entire world more or less united for the first time in history!
But the dark side of the isolation has led many of us
to begin to crumble, and wherever our mental health is fragile
to tend to break down.
So: frozen in the no man’s land of no work/school/groups/structure
or relief from one’s own self, multiple and endless failings
of creating and keeping a structure in place….
Yes, absolutely, give me that small wooden panel
and a deadline to make art! Oops, oh look,
I failed to put that structure together too, ok, look I’m going to
just draw directly on the wooden panel raw, like I am
right now, here it all is, me in my underwear submitting to that
I don’t know how to fix this process or my own inadequacies now.
I set myself up in the mirror and made a visual play
out of the battle at hand. For myself, personally, the COVID
isolation took away the distractions from a most singular battle,
the root of which is a chronic fear and unease,
a wrestling with some aspect of the world so personal,
I cannot easily put it into words.
I can say that it is one of those primary breaks most of us have
from our youth when we stopped Trusting.
When we became afraid and tucked our trust out of sight
and turned to protecting our vulnerabilities
from each other and the world, in one fashion or another.
Yep, that one.
So, out of creating a visual play of the battle at hand,
came this pose and classic style raw little drawing on wood
of my raw little process of seeking a deeper trust in God.
It made me think of the serpent in Genesis saying basically,
“Ah, you can’t trust this place or God –
here, take matters into your own hands…”
and God telling the serpent, “Because you have done this,
the seed of generations shall crush your head,
and you shall strike their heel.”
We shall crush its head. That pandemic is real, that serpent,
and our own personal battles striking at our heels are real.
And I can see – a lot of us can see – that trusting and
submitting to this process is to put the head of this thing underfoot.”
