COVID 19 – NO OUTLET
Hope in Dark Times

COVID 19 – NO OUTLET, Hope in Dark Times
Original Oil Painting: 30″ x 37″, Oil on Panel, $18,000, unframed
Prints are available. Please contact me by email.

I have some time here COVID 19 wise, so I want to give more of an explanation on this painting than I usually provide. One reason is that I hope when people observe the painting, they see what I do, or am trying to portray. Recently, I was looking at a drawing granddaughter drew and had to have it explained. What is it? Once I was told I totally got it and the drawing opened up to me. It was my back yard. Quite an amazing drawing, so much detail. I needed it explained.  Yes, felt a little silly after asking, really, my back yard? I thought maybe I can open up this painting for you by providing some explanation.

Close-ups, there a few weird reflections on mans’ face since the painting was complete today and it is still wet. I will rephotograph again later when dry.

You may say that this painting is in all of our backyards. COVID 19, the world’s back yard. It came to me one morning while taking a walk. I saw all the flower petals cascading sideways off a flowering tree. How beautiful. It took me far away as I enjoyed this experience. I wanted everyone to experience this hope in dark times. The painting emerged as I took a few pics with my cell phone camera as I walked our neighborhood that morning, here in Harrison Ohio.

Back to the studio to compose. You can observe my pencil sketch included with the photos in this blog post. I originally was thinking of a landscape, but quickly saw the portrait configuration as the better choice. This would give me a lot more sky for contrasting the figure. I started roughing in the sky. This is a more painterly approach that I enjoy most when painting. Allowing the painting to develop on canvas. You can follow this in the images included here. Please ask me questions if you like.

The house tree came directly from the pencil sketch. This is some kind of abstraction slowly developing within me as a painter that I enjoy being part of my painting. You can see some in the painting I did call man, here https://darylurig.com/blog/2019/11/05/man/#more-2998 The rest was creating a visual space that would accent the man and the sign.

Above shows the development steps of the fine arts oil painting.

We naturally all seem to understand looking up. Lookup for an answer, appreciation, other good reasons, what have you. As humans we get it. I felt this when I saw the trees giving up their flower petals, as the cascaded on a slant in the wind. I wanted to portray this hope I felt blessing me and all of us.

Contrasting the man with the sign was a way for me to express some of the confinement feelings and the initial thought of “No Outlet”. There is no way to run or hide from this Virus. It is here for everyone in the world. It, as little as it is, we can not even see it, is so powerful. This little thing has made us see how really small we are. Maybe even powerless, time to rethink priorities. Pitch in together. Social distance and respect for those around us that we interact with daily. What else can we learn?

Creating the right feeling and focus in the bottom left-hand corner was very important to me. It took me several attempts to develop this. Sometimes I felt the pedals are the blessing and other times I felt it I was living with the virus. We could be living with it for a while. It depends on how things go. We will just have to develop and learn how to. It is our 2020 Sci-Fi life now. We like those movies, but can we live this kind of life?

Nothing stays the same forever. We may have turned a corner on how we live. Think about it, if this had happened 10, 20 or 30 years ago what would we have done? This very bad thing has come at maybe the best time that we can handle and learn from it. Even a few years ago before Uber Eats, Zoom, drive-through food pick up at grocery stores, and so many other technologies make this horrible experience less dramatic.

What will we learn from this? To work together as one World? What will the new world look like? That Democrats and Republicans can work together here in the United States. Maybe we can take pride in being the united states? United different kinds of people with different needs and wants, but united as Human Beings. So many other positive things that we can also look forward to as we move forward and hopefully past this. What positive things can you see or imagine? Please share it here.

The Zoom Artist Mentoring classes will continue at a reduced rate of $40 per half hour during these important times to encourage positive and productive use of our time. Please prepay below, I will contact you by email to set up a convenient mentoring time .

Zoom Artist Mentoring