We sometimes like to speculate that we understand the complexities of life. We may even brag that we have a handle on what all is going on around us. We try to make everything binary, black or white, an either or scenario. There’s a confidence in that thinking that tries to make things as simple as possible and thereby easily understood. Our logical minds know that nothing is that easy but we want it to be, so very much.

There is good and there is bad, and there is left and right, but it is the indefinite layers in between that is unsettling because it is not easily labeled. Like onion skin, the layers are indefinite and the variations that make life messy and multifaceted. It is not simple, actually.

I had looked out my kitchen window the other day and was enjoying the birds on the feeders and the grape jelly, enjoying the false forget-me-nots (bernerra) blooming in the yard, enjoying the fact that the hostas didn’t get ruined in the recent hard frost. I also enjoyed watching a tiny bunny who apparently survived the extinction of his other nest mates. Now, I don’t necessarily enjoy having full grown rabbits treating my gardens like an all you can eat salad buffet but little bunnies are just too cute to get mad at. I’ve been out there weeding and almost put my hand on him, and as time has gone along I have enjoyed seeing him approach what I’d call pre adolescence, where he was a little more flighty, a little more brazen, and knew the channels under the hostages so well that I rarely encountered him but only saw him from a slight distance. I was telling a friend of mine on the phone about the bunny in the yard and realized that I had started to amorphize him.

Then, the other day I decided to do a quick study of him because bunnies are, like I said, pretty cute. So I put up a canvas, painted and got almost done before stopping for supper. As I stood in the kitchen talking to my husband we heard the unmistakable sound of a larger animal crashing through hosta leaves and then the unmistakable noise that a rabbit can make. I knew what it was in an instant and ran to the kitchen window to see a feral cat from the neighborhood racing down the sidewalk toward the alley with something larger in its mouth.

I can’t dwell on it. I hate to think about it. I know my pendulum is swaying from far left to far right and back. I know that it is the way of nature. I don’t believe in people letting their cats roam. Everthing deserves a right to live. It is the balance of nature and God’s call, but the bottom line is it began to represent our lack of control in our current environment. We can’t control the feral cat. We can’t control life-and-death. We can’t control anything but our own actions and our response to the uncontrollable.

I was sad for a bit, and then finished the little study in hommage to the wee bunny for he made me happy for our short part in it all.

For your enjoyment, the painting is an 11×14 oil on canvas called, “Hommage”

Ordinarily, this time of the year reenactors get together in great celebretory encampments all over the United States to talk history, smell good wood smoke, buy fine wares from historical craftsmen, and catch up on what everyone has been up to. History lovers have such a wide variety of special interests to bring to the table and in the living history communities especially, the variety is broad. Living history reenactors are often full time professionals in the trades, or we are teachers, doctors, librarians, artists or a myriad of other roles, but our common ground is a love of history.

Spring is the time to share about what we’ve researched over the winter, show what we’ve created or built, and to brag on new attire we have sewn. We talk of hunts, and purchases, new babies and the passing of old friends.

Like any close knit community, and believe me living history reenactors are a close knit family, we miss each other. We talk about seeing each other on Facebook and we call each other on the phone and we sit around in zoom and face time rooms showing each other quillwork and leatherwork and paintings …talking about when this will be over.

It’s hard… but we count on knowing that hard times pass. I have dozens of people that I only see in these settings but find myself extremely fond of. Some are brilliant and loving individuals, from all walks of life, and all capabilities, and all denominations of faith, and representing all of the peoples of mankind.

Unfortunately, the economic effects of this widespread illness may be the undoing of some small businesses in historical communities. In these new and unusual times of staying safe by staying away from each other, the living history communities cannot orchestrate large gatherings of camping historians (often a 100 or more tents) in a field or two. With events cancelling, the vendors in camp who have sown and hammered and created all Winter cannot now sell their wares to the other living historians. This is not just a hobby for them and these people do not have other professions. Living history IS their small business. Still they must pay their mortgages and buy their food just as any local small business owner we know must do.

It’s a helpless feeling to not be able to help small businesses in times like these. We find ourselves doing curbside pick up at our favorite restaurant knowing that it may help them sustain.

When you think of ordering online, I would encourage you to think about some of the small living history based businesses, artisans, and craftspeople you know and reach out to their websites. Look at what they’ve been doing and purchase directly on their secure sites. Help these historians who support themselves in a small business.

Today’s painting is a reminiscent little study, oil on canvas, of two of my friends sitting around a campfire at an event last summer. It is titled, “It was a good day, wasn’t it? “.

“Make peace with imperfection”. This is one of the phrases I took away from an online teaching group discussion I attended today. While certainly a true phrase for trying to deliver content in an online teaching environment, especially if the transition has been rapid and without warning like this Spring has been, it hit me how applicable it is in painting. I am notorious for worrying a subject to death and not stopping soon enough, thereby striving for perfection and falling terribly short.

I also know that another phrase that came out of that meeting, “less is more” (remeniscent of Meis logic) is also applicable. Instead of trying to show everything that you are capable of as a painter in one piece, stick to the synthesis, or simple way. It’s exactly what plein aire is all about. In that style you look, judge, synthesize, and quickly capture the impression of what you’re seeing. Small studies in the studio follow the same principle. So while I’m listening and watching a zoom meeting, my mind is jumping to a next lesson on canvas.

Our new normal is a blend of teaching and learning with one job and having that job be embedded in your home environment, complete with all of the new tasks and precautions of the pandemic. When we get groceries they come into the house and get processed in an assembly line of wiping and disinfecting and all fresh produce gets washed in the stainless steel sinks and dried in the drainer.

Timing in learning is part of the integration process. My worlds collided today. If you need subject matter for your paintings, you are literally surrounded by thousands of chances to ply your trade. Today’s painting is the merge of what I learned in my meetings and what we now do in our home work flow.

This piece is an 8 by 10 oil on canvas called, “Quarantine Still-life” (or, now everything gets washed)

So like many others here in the United States, we are staying at home.

I am in a fortunate position to be working from home, but there is also a portion of the time that I have here in the house that is clocked out. At that point, I am Kelly the artist instead.

When I go to reach for subject matter my input is now limited to the rooms of my house and puttering around my backyard to get some fresh air. I can do still life studies, and certainly do sometimes, but now’s also when I should turn to all of those photographs that I took while on vacation. I take those thinking I’m going to reach for them at some point, but often forget to. Now is when I need to open up the albums and relive the vacations. I can see the views from the wonderful driving trip we took to upstate New York, or to the West where we camped along the Rocky Mountains, or even when we took that meandering trip up to Minaqua to see fall colors. I have hundreds of pictures and dozens of them could make great paintings. I need to keep reaching into those memory files and pulling out a picture and saying “Ah, wasn’t that a fabulous vacation? Wasn’t that a fun time!”

This latest study is oil on canvas, hiking up the draw at Watkins Glen, New York two years ago.

Each day we are confronted with waves of contradicting information and its hard to know what to believe, or do.

Science tells us to stay cautious and vigilant to preserve our health and the health of our co-workers and loved ones. Our national and regional administrators tell us both that “all will be well and over soon…” or that “we have yet to see the peak of the impact and it could get worse if we lighten up at all”. We are grateful that our spiritual leaders have taken our services online and our workplace accommodates our work-from-home status.

The foundation of our faith asks that we speak and act with the confidence and grace that affirms our trust in God’s will and mercy and continue to pray for our safety. God gives us choice so that we can weigh the facts, the opinions, the mandates, and our faith. Sometimes it can be terribly hard to decide what to do next.

Prayer can calm our mind and spirit and allow for the clarity of thought we need to make those good choices.

We could have never imagined the scenario that we are currently living through. The world is under siege from an unseen virus and from a rigor of our own self realizations that we are actually flawed and fragile creatures that survive only because we are part of a larger whole and overseen by a higher power.

It is a time when many of us, even those not inclined to do so, are slowing down and becoming introspective to some degree. We spend time alone and think about our place in the world. We think about our priorities of family, work, and life. We come to realize what truly brings us joy, and peace. We identify what our physical needs truly are such as food and shelter, and what our spiritual needs also truly are.

The gravity of a worldwide pandemic certainly disrupts our routines, scares us, and rattles our trust – sometimes making us lash out in fear. It breaks normal patterns, and makes new ones. It creates new priorities and we discover our new, evolving normal. We also begin to realize that mankind cannot thrive without creativity. It is in fact, the dreamers and creative thinkers who not only provide us with the visual arts, dance, music and more to sustain our spirits, but it is they who find workarounds to sharing resources, who discover the vaccines, and who find ways to sustain us quite literally like humanity’s connective tissue.

When creative people are quarantined they reach for the knitting, and they reach for the guitars, and they reach for the paintbrush, because they know that it is just as important as the sustenance of food. Just as Kandinsky found correlations between music and color, we too must find correlation between the lovely quiet that has started to emerge from stay-at-home directives and a sub level of sound where music and wind chimes and children’s laughter and our own voices become the light and color of our souls. Those who don’t remember how to hear that level within themselves are the ones that are panicking by not being out in the public. They need us to help.

I am thankful every day for my life. I am thankful every day for those people that I have surrounded my heart with for they are the thinkers, and the musicians, and the painters, and the knitters. They are the ones who carefully steward mankind’s spirit during times of crisis and share it back to those in need like fabulous little morsels when the world is starving.

Despite the fear and the anxiety that is prevalent right now, I know that we will emerge from this as humans with a greater love for each other, a greater tolerance of each other’s flaws, and a stronger mankind overall. We must never let the louder voices be the voices that we follow blindly. We must instead be quieter and follow the much more subtle voices of silver thread networked between each other.

When I was growing up we would go on long car rides and my mom would always say, “Oh look, there’s a white horse! Quick kids, make a wish.”

I have since heard that making a wish on a white horse tends to be an Irish tradition. I don’t know how much truth there is in that but I will always believe. Now, whenever I’m going down a road and see a white horse in the field, I happily hear my mom’s voice in my mind and I think of her, smile to myself, and with a slight bit of superstition … I make a wish.

Sharing with you today, my reminiscence of that happy superstition. Make a wish.

We all have our favorite subjects to paint or favorite pallete we tend to use and drifting into those comfortable places when we sit down to paint is perfectly ok. After all, we paint because we love what we do and time is often at a premium. It is easy to just launch and not search for a subject that makes a new statement but is instead a tried and true image or formula.

That being said, sometimes we need to stretch our creative muscles.

Occasionally I will look at photographs I have taken and think of what attracted me to the view or image at that moment. Was it redeemable? Could it be a worthwhile painting? That question is what stops me today and makes me wonder, ‘what is my purpose for any particular painting session?’ And yes, the reason can vary!

If our reason to paint on any given day is purely to relax and have fun then that can be enough. If, however, we decide that we want to expand our abilities beyond the improvement that occurs with practice, we might also be heightening the risk of failure. I wonder how much pressure I place on myself for the time at the easel to be fruitful, and equating fruitful to time wasted and the potential loss of revenue.

Although I may say I am not painting to make my living, I must admit I don’t want to purely paint in my own vacuum and store work or gift it like I did early in my career. Perhaps I am not being genuine when I say it then? I do want to sell most of what I paint. I would like to share what I do with others. It’s gratifying and lucrative and therefor, helpful.

That begs the introspection of assessing why we’re painting in any given day and as a result, the potential censure of painting something that may fail because to fail means it won’t sell. That’s a self defeating loop. We need to continually challenge ourselves and gamble with potential failure. Yes, sometimes we need to paint for the pleasure, and sometimes we need to paint for revenue. Improvement is dependent on challenge so perhaps we should also include, sometimes we paint to stretch.

As for myself, I know I need to continually stretch outside my comfort zone so that I can expand the perimeters of that comfort zone, improve the quality of my work, and succeed more often than I fail by facing the challenges head on. It might actually, potentially, result in more sales.