2020 started off as such a good year, full of hope and promise for the new decade. Three months later, while the world reeled from the impact of Lockdown, life on the farm responded gently and quietly to yet another crisis. The horses, cows and forest carried on as usual, living their best, one day at a time and their ease with life rubbed off on the humans and kept our fears under control.
I took advantage of the time to continue exploring the creative journey started with FYJ in 2019. When the worldwide lockdowns were announced, the memes started to reflect how artists, who usually squeezed their art in between daily chores, kids and work, were gleefully stocking up on paper, paint and pastels whilst their neighbours were stocking up on tins of baked beans and toilet paper. Finally time was slowing down and art could be a priority. Until that quietly sapping, unsettling realization that we were in big, big trouble and all our creative juices dried up. Plenty of desire to paint, but everything either seemed irrelevant or frivolous or too depressing and people started to understand how their art really was an expression of their emotional and mental state and few of us had ever needed to paint through a very demanding time. I lost the desire to play with my horses, choosing to walk quietly through them, rather than paint them and they were quite content with me being in their space without an agenda!
So I went back to the studio, via the fruit bowl in the kitchen, and started to draw and paint pears.
One day, after spending many hours painstakingly drawing in sepia pencil, I found most of my pears gone! And all over my lovely drawing was the evidence of the thief! We live next to an indigenous mistbelt forest that is home to a troop of endangered samango monkeys. One had spotted the pile of pears through the window and when I took my dogs for a walk, sneaked through the front door and into my studio and had a feast! So I had to make a pear shaped fruit salad of a painting to hide the dribbles of juice and monkey paw marks!!
Nature just being nature, regardless of humans and their pandemic.