Coping mechanisms for troubling times.

I didn't have a lot of free time in the studio today: the tree guys were here, our cleaning lady was back after a 2 month hiatus, and our jobs are starting to gather steam again.

But over the weekend a friend reminded me that I have a smaller squeegee I haven't been using, so I re-gessoed a small canvas and played on it a bit.

I do like the effect, but I have trouble seeing how other kinds of marks work with it; the swirls are so strong -- and of course, on a small canvas, they quickly dominated the piece.

So I let it have a sort of floral feel -- and decided I'd rather stick to larger squeegees, with somewhat less definition to their curves. I haven't actually decided this is a direction I want to move in; it's just that I love what some of the other artists I follow are doing with it, and so wanted to explore. I don't get the feeling it's really... me, exactly -- more that it's what I feel like doing right now: safer, smaller, easier to write off failures, I suspect. I'm not pouring in my full energy here, just putting in time, and that's okay, too -- at least I'm sticking to the discipline.

And the truth is, I've been pretty low lately, easily discouraged, not sleeping particularly well -- all (I gather) typical side effects of this enforced seclusion, but in my case further exacerbated by a series of frustrating disappointments. Oddly enough, I decided this morning to list them all in hopes it would make them less overwhelming, and there were NINETEEN different things that had gone wrong in the last 4 months. I'm calling them "My CoVid 19," in hopes we're at the end of this particular chain of events...