I was painting and teaching during the Pandemic. Personally and collectively we have tried to put memories of that first year of the pandemic behind us. Ask any woman who has given birth to confirm that we all possess the ability to quietly push the truly uncomfortable far from our consciousness. In the field of education, that first year nearly broke us, the students, the parents, the teachers.
I was teaching sixth grade at the time and it was March, that sweet spot of the academic year when students were feeling their own progress, finding their footing in the good habits built up over the year as they prepared to head off to middle school the next fall.
At the beginning, no one (I’m speaking of the administrators) knew what to do. We were told not to reach out to students, so of course, I started making short videos and putting them up on you tube and linking those to my site daily. I loved teaching and felt just as strong about my students and needed to find some way to help them through this time of incredible uncertainty. I talked with them, read to them, curated fun educational shorts, just to remind them that I was there and they are still a class, a kind of family.
After we received direction from the district the fun stopped. Each teacher had to take a curriculum area for our grade level and make videos. Sure, make instructional videos tied to our curriculum for everything we would have covered in class. My first took 10 hours, as did every other teacher’s. I cleaned out my art supplies from my home studio and set up my virtual classroom and my days became a repetition of the one before; shower, commute across the hall,, teach, have virtual office hours to answer questions and talk with parents. Each day finished with preparing for the next day which was no small feat since we were building from scratch. My work day started at 7 am and ended at 10pm most days. There were no virtual substitutes so you just showed up whatever state you were in, however sick you were.
The district announced that students were allowed to turn their cameras off. Unfortunately,, as one did, the others eventually followed. I did talk them into just putting their camera on the ceiling so at least I knew when they stood up and left the room. Teaching to a box of disembodied voices was demoralizing and not what I signed up for. I did anything I could to get them to turn their camera on. I came up with some pretty silly ideas, including the most popular which was blanket fort days. Students were excited to show their creations to each other and I would put them in groups so they could engage with each other. I did the same and was quite stiff those days but it was so worth it.
September 2020 April 2020
On one wall of my defunct studio/new classroom I purposely left a cart full of paint and a 48x60 piece of raw canvas hung on wall. I knew somehow I needed to stll create, although I had no idea what would appear. At night, before bed I watched my share of you tube shorts and ran across a longer video with a story about changing the furniture in the room and how unsettling it could be. Growing up my mother was a serial furniture mover. Some days, I came home from school to find the living room furniture in a new or previously repeated configuration. I never really liked it when she did that because I think many of us don’t truly appreciate and embrace change, even the simplest kind. I immediately hooked on to this as a metaphor for how I was feeling about life during the pandemic. I dug out a black and white photo of my parent’s 1949 apartment on Greenfield Ave. in Canton, Ohio to use as inspiration. I painted “The Furniture Moves Everyday” over the course of six months on weekends, over breaks, sometimes in the middle of the night if I couldn’t sleep. This painting saved me. It became a great source of joy, tethering me through the rough waters. It's one of my favorites as I look at it in hindsight with its crazy perspective, the weaving of real and figurative and it's sherbert on steroids color palette all combine to infer the uncertain, askew, sideways yet . . . joyful nature of life.
