The fog of unknowing

Having spent much of my morning arguing with my spouse about the relative safety of going to the grocery store vs getting deliveries and the relative wisdom of stocking up vs the shame associated with hoarding, it seems clear there's no one right answer: everything must be carefully weighed against what limited knowledge is available.

Just as Pontius Pilate claims in his mythical interview with Jesus in Dostoevski's Brothers Karamazov, we humans want answers -- which is why, to me, it looks like this painting is reaching out for help.

I can't quite decide if it's completed or not: I just decided to use a little phthalo blue (red shade), which I'm not sure I've ever played with before, and see where it took me. I went back to liquid acrylics (the more I looked at yesterday's piece, the more I felt there might be such a thing as too much texture) and brushes (same reasoning) and decided to just let the painting be a physical thing, going where the brushes led me.

-- which is a little challenging, because with brush strokes it's easy to see what the artist is doing; harder to blame the finished product on "well, that's just what the paint decided to do." The end result is a little ... I'm not sure what the word is, but there's not a lot of movement; it's pretty one-directional, so part of me thinks it might need some splatters or something to perk it up?

On the other hand, looking at it again, it's like there's a city in the center, being overtaken by a kind of dark fog. Which makes me think of this morning's news, that New York now has 10 times as many CoVid cases as Washington state. I hadn't realized things were so bad there, though of course the disparity may simply be that they've been given more tests to administer; I believe tests are still in short supply here...

But that news, and a first-hand account I made the mistake of reading, worked together to raise new levels of fear in me -- which in turn led to the above-mentioned arguments. I don't want my husband to go to the store; it just seems the less contact we have with the world, the better off we'll be. But the likelihood of dying, given our age, seems high enough that I'm not sure I think storing months of beans and soups is exactly necessary...

For sure these are challenging times.  But (and you can see this at the federal level) we only make it worse if we get entrenched in our differences: the only way we will survive is cooperation. The sooner we all figure that out, the better off we'll be.

Learnings: Don't be afraid to show your brush strokes.
                   Pthalo blue, red shade, is not a bad blue, a little strong, but with nice purple overtones.