During late 2020, while spending the year-end holidays with my family in Saint-Sulpice, Switzerland, I got sick with COVID. What a lousy way to spend Christmas and New Year’s Day. It was before any vaccine was available, and a lot was still unknown about the virus. Many people my age and older (I was 60 at the time) were dying after complications in hospital emergency rooms. I felt miserable and uncertain about my prospects. It was a very scary passage. I quarantined for two weeks. My wife Claudia carefully monitored me throughout each day from a downstairs location, while I sequestered in an upstairs bedroom of the home we were staying in adjacent to my longtime in-laws’ residence near Lake Geneva. The juxtaposition of my situation could not have been more stark: Outside my window were views to the Lake and the French Alps that were breathtaking in their beauty. But in my bedroom were dark, rolling thoughts about whether this could be my end. It’s remarkable how suddenly facing one’s end can focus you like a laser.
But the mind can only do what the body allows it to. Among the most profound and lasting impacts of COVID’s affect on my body, mind and spirit were heavy fatigue, short term memory loss, and a felt absence of motivation to produce new thinking or art. For days, I struggled to conceptualize something that I could paint to help me get my head around what was happening in a more positive way. But I could neither for the life of me conjure anything that excited me enough to paint nor muster the energy to get anything on paper or canvas, in any case. It was an unprecedented and daunting situation for me. Art had always been my ‘go to’ therapy in every time of need throughout my life. Now, no matter how many times I tried to switch on the creativity, I got no juice. It was like trying to start a car with a dead battery.
In the subsequent days, as the hours passed by, one after the other, and there was nothing for me to do but wait out my fate, I started trying to paint doodles, rather than my customary, detailed stories. I went back to the informing sources of my earliest childhood memories. I relied on largely mono-color backdrops on 14” x 16” cardboard; and, little by little, using chalk and imprint techniques with my paint brush, I started scrawling something on each work that began to approximate a lost indigenous hieroglyph. It was like I was unwittingly releasing long-hidden messages from some past time, in a way that was meaningful for the present moment. It was like the power of a long-held secret was finally unleashed.
COVID taught me to face life in living color. I intuit from this series of works a message of love and reassurance from the Heavens, from Mother Earth, and from my innermost center of creative power. Even now four years later, I am physically unable to produce art the way I used to. I lack the vision and the stamina I once had to produce the kind of art that uses familiar imagery from daily life and nature to tell stories. But, in the absence of the capacity to draw on traditional sources of my creative expression, the Source has guided me to new, more abstract ways of expressing my spirit, my ideas, and my artistic POV. And, so, I offer these evolving new works as a window into my shifting consciousness and worldview. It is a worldview that is less concerned about reflecting what is or even a feeling about what is; rather, it is concerned about forms and feelings related to what could or should be. It is a window to something that is still not accessible, but nevertheless highly worthy and desirable. It is a world of color and form in which all are invited and all can strive towards something better.
Whatever our station or our passions, creativity and expression are the higher forces that enable us to face each day with our full humanity, in living color.