Pandemic Painting

The beach, a common peaceful place of enjoyment for many people. I enjoy people enjoying themselves. I enjoy the art in the world. I enjoy juxtaposition and the fascinating correlations that can be found in the smallest of comparisons.

I myself quite enjoy a cooler environment. I like the late Autumn and Winter seasons. The chance to wear warm sweaters and watch the world change around me as it goes to sleep for awhile. Getting ready for a rebirth in the Spring, I get to see the world for what it is, a cycle.

I enjoy painting. I am not a professional by any means, but I find enjoyment in the process. I also find it wonderful to have the chance to recycle items that may be otherwise trash or unusable in a set and give them a new life.

A wonderfully wise and well experienced woman in my life, I’ll call her C, had some old ceramic bowls that she no longer needed. She offered them to me and looking at them together we noticed a chip in one of them. I immediately knew I wanted to make it an art project. Being that she herself is an artistic, kind, and free-spirited person, she understood immediately my intention when I expressed that I could still make use of the bowl.

Alas, it was a couple years before I would begin let alone accomplish the task. In fact, it was early with the pandemic in 2020 that I found myself with some time having lost my job working with special needs since there were to be no more in-person instruction.

The small bowl was a pale green. I knew I would need to make it all neutral before creating anything. I also knew all along I wanted to create a piece that would depict two different scenes on either side of the bowl. I took out my paints and set to sketching out the rough idea of what I wanted to do. I had the idea to combine a summer and winter scene. This evolved into a beach on one side and an igloo on the other.

The idea was the easiest part. Though, as difficult and time consuming as it was to transform the bowl into the piece of art, it was well spent and eye opening. I simply held the inside of the bowl with one hand while applying layers of white paint in order to give myself a blank slate. This took a couple hours in order to fully accomplish. I would sit there, focusing on each stroke, picturing the final result, but finding myself seeing that result getting blurry as I continued to work.

My hand was cramping, and I continuously would lose focus. When I would look towards my goal, something seemed too impersonal. Any art I engage in, whether it be written or visual imagery, as most artists would attest there needs to be a personal aspect. There needs to be a place where a piece of your soul can attach to, somewhere your that piece can shine back at all who behold it. Somehow, this project wasn’t mine.

I put it down for a couple days and spent some extra personal time just relaxing, meditating, focusing intently and peripherally on the project. I finally understood why it had suddenly lost its meaning. I had lost my sense of everything personal. My sense of meaning. My sense of purpose whatsoever. What I did for work, helping adults and children with special needs learn skills and communicate their needs, as well as helping their caretakers and loved ones learn how to communicate with them, had ceased.

As with most during the pandemic, the sudden cessation of social contact was having a strange toll. I normally wouldn’t be one to miss being around people. I’m quite an introvert. However, our routines matter to us. Routine of work had shifted so severely that I was learning I didn’t know what to do with myself. I am a helper. I suddenly had no one to help every day.

Realizing this, I set out to reconnect with old contacts and clients in the field. I got to hear about my impact on others and where they were currently at in their life. I was able to think more about how my impact, anyone’s impact, may not always be ostensibly apparent to us at any given time, but we leave marks on all those we interact with.

I always enjoyed my work, however frustrating and heart breaking it could be sometimes. It was the worthwhile process and being able to witness personal change in others that gave such genuine satisfaction. I look at everything as an art. People, and the things we enjoy, are art. I was able to see imperfections as artistic differences rather than set social expectations. I was able to see that while my routine of work was broken and that I could no longer go and help someone learn every day, I was now tasked with being in the position of helping myself.

While the project I was working on was indeed something I wanted to do, I had found that I was feeling lost doing it because I wasn’t used to doing things for myself and my own happiness. Finding enjoyment in others left a void when there were no longer others to enjoy.

I resumed my artistic endeavor. What had been a solitary project, I chose to now share updates with people close to me. I took pictures of the process and asked for input. It wasn’t long before I had a product that I was proud of.

Completing this piece, something I had intended to for a couple years prior, felt like such an accomplishment. I reflected that what I learned in being inspired to complete the piece, was indeed the reason that it took so long to commence with it to begin with. I was not giving myself the time to indulge in that which I enjoyed just for myself. I was lost. I was defining my self-worth based on how I impacted others. This project began my journey to self-care. Since then, a lot has changed in our lives. For myself, there has been significant change, for better and worse. I recently found myself in a new chapter, finally embracing my childhood passion of creative writing.

This project is a beautiful bookend, ornate and gleaming. I look forward to the series of events that will fill the shelves until the final page meets an equally spectacular bookend when it is all over.