The Safe at Home series was born on March 13 of this year. It was our daughter’s 24th birthday and she was in the other Washington on the other side of the country. But the distance separating us from her was so much more than just the miles. We would not be seeing her in two weeks as planned. In fact, we couldn’t know for sure when we would see her next—or for that matter, if she, or we, would be okay. Because at that point, the world seemed to be a more perilous place with each passing day. I wanted nothing more than to scoop her up and bring her back home. The fierceness of that desire, and the futility of it, was heartrending.
In the studio that day, I sat down to a work in progress, a return to the motif of the nest, now working on veiled background of collaged pages collected from an old Japanese journal. This first new nest was still empty, as if echoing back to me my worst fears. I could not bear looking at it that way any longer. I painted my way to a simulacrum of the three of us together again, three eggs nestled in the carefully hewn twigs and dried mud. It was a small comfort, but a (mostly fruitless) attempt to feel some degree of control over something.
A few hours later I was curled up on the sofa, not realizing the overwhelming fatigue and dizziness I was feeling would only get worse, and only much later prove to be Covid19. It took over a month to fully recover and regain strength, energy and motivation, but when I did, I returned to the nests. These paintings are what arose from that tenuous feeling of being gratefully, gladly safe at home, yet still feeling undeniably vulnerable, for myself and my loved ones, for my friends and neighbors, near and far—all held aloft in this fragile middle space.
See the Safe at Home series, and all of my 2020 paintings, here. For the month of August, 2020, it will be on display at Gray Sky Gallery in Seattle’s Pioneer Square. Email me or the gallery for pricing.