December 2020 Year-end Newsletter/Life and Art in the Time of Coronavirus

What a year.

Let me begin with a little gratitude journaling.

While I know a number of people who have suffered and died from the Coronavirus, my immediate family members remain healthy. 

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We had a lovely summer, during which my yard grew and bloomed like crazy. My husband made repairs on and painted my studio and much of the exterior of the house. A series of breakdowns (plumbing, washing machine, car, I can’t even remember what else) forced upgrades and interior renovations as well. Also a huge amount of sorting, divesting of stuff, and organizing of those things that made the cut, projects that had been needed for years, maybe even decades.

 

 

I have zoomed and zoomed, teaching yoga and painting and hanging out with family. In August we arranged the very open corner of our front porch into an outdoor living space and had folks over at a safe distance while numbers were low in NYS and the weather held, catching up on each other’s Covid-era lives.

I am grateful to our governor for governing, and being an innovator in dealing with the Covid crisis. I have never much liked Cuomo in the past and may go back to disliking him in the future, but he stepped up and kept us as safe as he could. And I felt safer for it.

Also on my gratitude list is the greatly raised awareness created by the Black Lives Matter movement and resulting baby steps towards police reform. As I listened more intently to the stories being told and the history behind them, I learned a great deal. I also reread the three Toni Morrison novels that I have on my bookshelves and made myself really sit with the horror, understanding that it is not behind us.

 

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Deep breath.

The whole year was rich creatively for me in my studio. While I feel that my life has a nice balance between painting and time spent with family and friends, practicing and teaching yoga, hiking, gardening, and reading, I also see the rewards of decades of obsessiveness about my creative practice. I have so much momentum and so many ideas to be followed up on that I don’t get blocked, and that has served me beautifully during quarantine. My studio continues to be my refuge, the place where a world of things are possible.

I am very grateful for this video, brainchild of Silver Hollow audio—who created it first as an audio project—and the Emerson Resort, who added the slideshow to make this wonderfully produced six-minute survey of my work as a landscape painter in the Catskills. It was featured during their remote Community Week offerings. They had to take it down and relaunch to correct a typo, and I am afraid that there were a number of folks who tried to go to it a few hours after the launch and found the link broken. Here is a working link:

Sales have been robust. I have also done six commissions in 2020, when some years I don’t do a single one.

 

The commissioned painting that I did during lockdown was the largest painting I have done to date, an incredible project to have at such a time. Above is the 6’x8′ painting after it was installed by Albert Shahinian Fine Art.

 

Fall has been busy, with folks returning indoors and seeking out new paintings to enjoy in their homes. Here is a sampling:

 

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After months of Covid routine I still have moments of shock at where the world has landed. I was one of the folks who believed in the scientific predictions of an upcoming pandemic and had tracked the news about the H1N1, SARS, and Ebola outbreaks (the latter not over, by any means), feeling huge relief that they had been contained before a pandemic ensued.

So I was reading intently about Covid-19 from early January. (Thank-you NY Times. I have heard people say that there was no coverage early on but that is not true—they were reporting on it daily, but most readers were not paying attention.). It didn’t take more than a few articles, as the evidence emerged, for me to become convinced that this time we were in for it, all of us.

And yet, I could not conceive, really, of what that would look like. The wildfire spread and chaos in Wuhan wouldn’t happen here, right? We would learn from their mistakes and prepare, right? And then Italy’s mistakes and oh whoops it’s here and nobody has done a thing for containment, medical treatment, the economy…nada. No learning, no preparing, no leadership…and maybe worst of all, no efforts to create a national sense of community and responsibility towards each other.

But of course, we are shocked day after day by the poisonous indifference at the top, even marveling at our continued ability to be shocked at each ugly outburst, each new blatant lie and evidence of corruption and narcissistic failure to govern.

Cutting to the chase, I will summarize by saying that when we look back on this period, it will look like the Influenza Epidemic of 1918-20; the Great Depression, the McCarthy era, and the civil unrest of the late 1960s, all rolled into one.

Looking to the nearer future, I believe that we have to seek justice and redress for those who have committed crimes. And as for those who show signs of wanting to shake off the trance induced by the orange cool aid, we need to think about what deprogramming could look like. Shaming and raging (much as it would seem appropriate because many deaths have been caused) won’t help in that effort, and if we can recoup any citizens from this zombie apocalypse, we should.

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Deep breath.

Images of my newest work:

 

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Since last summer I have given a good deal of thought to this coming winter, mulling over ideas for how I can contribute to the comfort and engagement of others. With my back-to-back workshops for the Woodstock School of Art I have worked to inspire a creative spark, encouraging the kind of focus that is healing and invigorating. Nonetheless, I could envision winter, with its increased isolation and Covid anxiety, creating a bigger, deeper need.

So I dreamed up a workshop that I hope will bring us back to our most loved places. Going straight for the heart, it is called, “Love and Longing: Landscape and Mood”. Quite a departure from my roster of zoomed classes so far, which have focused on formal considerations, from color-mixing to composition.

CHRISTIE SCHEELE LOVE AND LONGING: LANDSCAPE AND MOOD

December 16, 2020 | Categories: Uncategorized | Tags: Albert Shahinian Fine Art, art benefit, art collecting, art in coronatimes, art in hard times, art in pandemic, art in the time of coronavirus, atmospheric landscapes, Cape Cod paintings, Catskills, christie scheele, color field, composition, food insecurity, food pantries, headlights, lonely road, Louisa Gould Gallery, Martha's Vineyard paintings, minimalist landscape, minimalist landscapes, moody landscape, Mountain paintings, seascapes, sunsets, teaching, Tender Land Home Phoenicia, weather, Woodstock School of Art, workshops | 2 Comments