Finding Myself Through My Art in the Pandemic
In the fall before our pandemic years, on the eve of separating from my then husband, I was on a vacation in Spain. At the Prado Museum, I found myself staring at Las Meninas by Velázquez, a painting I had looked at so closely in my high school textbook more than 15 years before.
I felt a strange dissociation while looking at that same painting but now older. It’s also a painting that mystically looks back at you.
Am I the person that younger me had wanted, I thought suddenly in that museum, now that I’m here?
I had always wanted to go to a traditional art school, to be an artist, but I simply was too afraid to do so after high school. So I never did it.
2020 arrived rapidly after that vacation and my marriage ended, with our offstage pandemic coming to crash the play. Strangely enough, now came the art school I had always been looking for but in a form I hadn’t expected more than a decade later.
Before the pandemic years, I had started bit by bit into making art, timidly approaching it at first but gaining steam as I took continuing education classes. But I never had the right partnerships, friendships, or sense of self to jump right into my own art style, though.
When New York City’s lockdown appeared imminent, my sudden fear of being alone in this totalizing new way was more than I could take at first. I planned on running immediately. But my mother, who is also a visual artist and similarly struggled through her own journey through making her art, told me to simply stay. And she encouraged me to make a lot of art, too.
So instead of leaving, I walked miles to an art store to load up on printmaking supplies, our fear of the unknown virus swirling everywhere and keeping me from the subway.
I turned my parquet floor into a makeshift printing studio first because I couldn’t be in my finally signed up for printmaking class. I printed everything in blue, everywhere, day and night.
I watched an endless amount of videos on techniques from other artists, connected with an art community online primarily on Instagram, and streamed many art history documentaries on YouTube. I took notes on it all, seeing the connections and personal importance of the pursuit of creativity in every story I learned. I saw how Matisse discovered the power of color with newly gifted paints from his mother when he was stuck sick in bed as a kid with only his window to inspire him. I learned how the populist printmaking journey of Corita Kent kept her sense of religious joy at the center of herself and her political work. I felt the universal truth of Keith Haring dropped that all that really mattered was finding his own visual language, not an art school.
During that time I drew, printed, painted, and collaged constantly, often just on any piece of paper I could find, eschewing the bounds of notebooks and instead opting for blank pages of any kind. I made art when I was tired from Zoom. I made art when I was happy and when I was terribly sad. I sent every single thing I made to my mom in my phone’s photos app. She critiqued it all, giving me feedback. Our commentary became a collective art review, the best art class I have ever been in.
I taped things to my walls, took my art for actual walks, and made huge messes I had to always sit with the next day. I tried over and over. In this way, I learned to reckon with the ambiguity of making my art and my images in the middle of personal and collective upheaval.
I made a lot of bad art in that year and the next. But so-called bad art is really the best kind of art I realized for the first time. I came to understand that the accumulation of trying to make your art, and especially bad art, is like trying to speak a language for the first time. It’s also a language only particular to you, almost like it existed before you knew you had to speak it kind of thing. So you need lots of chances to be exposed to yourself, building on the elements you observe before you can start speaking fluently. It’s a process that is like finally discovering reruns of Friends when you’ve been dreaming of speaking American colloquial English: you might not think it’s good, but it's exactly what you need.
The end goal of making this art isn’t to arrive with your art at the final destination as an artist though. The goal is to be present with yourself, a meditative process of looking that stares right back at you if you’re patiently aware. And the flow of making art saved my life in a moment when I felt all the doors had closed in on me. In fact, my art taught me I had the power to open them. And making art proved to me that in reality, the doors had been opened all along.
I found the simple truth of the art school of life then: that making art is like a process of meditation we all have the ability to do. Simply put, that art is zen. I began unlocking what I hadn’t realized with this truth, which is that you don’t need anything but yourself to be an artist. In fact, you’re already an artist even before you start.
And joining into the flow of my art school of life, I also found a way to sit present with my parents and my complicated relationship with them, especially my mother. My mother’s own struggle as Jane Fonda writes in her autobiography, is my mother’s story to tell her, but in the months of distanced artmaking, I finally saw her for who she was that I just didn’t understand fully as a child and young adult. I found it possible to forgive both of my parents for not giving me the attention I needed as a younger adult to go to art school and to speak up for myself and my needs, as is sadly often the case when parents who are in their own pain miss the quiet kid that doesn’t mess up when she may need some guidance.
But after it all, I think I may just have never been ready for art school until I had to do it on my own. There may have been no other way than in a small Brooklyn apartment alone in a global pandemic.
“As a kid, you told me you saw shapes,” my mom told me one day on the phone during the early pandemic “ I knew that would be important one way or another back then”
After those artmaking years and the one I am still in, I now carry these shapes with me everywhere, in each experiment I make, in each abstract mark I paint, cut, draw, or sculpt. They’re all made of my childhood shapes: my colorful, moving, vibrating doodles of shapes, filling up sketchbooks, drawers, and canvases, accumulating at a jubilant and delirious pace I won’t be able to slow down any time soon.
