100 Portraits In 100 Days: A Quarantine Diary

“Despair be damned” could be an epigraph on every page. — Phil Cousineau, from the Foreword“One hundred paintings, five-score works of art. When asked how she managed such a sunburst of creativity in the darkest of times, she replied that the work came to her out of what Kandinsky once incandescently called “inner necessity.” In a personal communication, she writes:What I love about painting is that you don't have to know what you're doing to begin and you can go anywhere without any consequences except using up art supplies. Where else in life can we feel that kind of freedom from the known without fear? Painting my way through the pandemic was a way I met my fear of uncertainty by exaggerating it. I could be suffering emotionally and create anyway. A small daily painting was evidence of my sanity and ability to celebrate, however meekly, getting through another day, thinking that I had no idea what to paint. ‘Let's see what happens’ mirrored my thoughts that I had no idea about what anything in my life meant anymore. But I could try and make something meaningful to me. I could do the one thing that always makes me feel better: make art. Creating something out of less than nothing, out of death and destruction, is being on a warrior path, and felt like the phoenix was rising in me. Telling the truth about difficult emotions and circumstances feels vulnerable, but those are the stories I most want to hear. Read more