I haven’t paid any attention to this blog in a long time, since covid really. My spellcheck still suggests “Ovid”. I wasn’t sure i had anything much worth saying. I read a lot of psychiatry. I leaned more to the left. There was no shortage of pundits and people with the time to write anxious thoughts freed by lockdown to self expression. My instinct is usually to depict the immediate concern in words much as in paint but there are privacy issues in writing that don’t come into play in paint so much. I don’t see how i do anyone any good living publicly in intimate journal mode in a small Canadian town, how I’d write anything helpful from a comfortable Canadian reclusion in mine. I’d been writing a long essay about race, who hadn’t?
I lived in the middle of forty forest acres online. I had dreary little to confess in the line of confessional poetry. Nothing in particular and the particular was the concern.I was hardly on the front lines.

I kept painting though, the chores and the pattern behavior of the studio filling my days. They comfort me, by moving through them I am meeting an albeit strangely pitched but rigorous, standard of behavior, self imposed, practiced if not obviously practical. I dunno. You try to hold up your end. The country life involves so many chores one must not think of them as such I suppose, for as much of the time as you can swing it.

My partner is a health care worker so we were by no means safely and completely cut off from the world. Much of my family is quite old now scattered in towns faraway and nearby. It seems we’re in for a hard winter, a wave. we hope fascinated, the train wreck to the south ends well, har.

I kept painting away, the market dead, but the paintings were mostly on he periphery of my vision. Going nowhere fast. for their safety turned to the wall. Occasionally I’d zoom in and paint. it seems like they’ve been out on the edge of things for a long time. I expanded the garden. We got out on the river in the canoe now and then, learned to entertain at a distance.

There’s always something to do around the place. Go masked into the village, run to the dump or the gas station in maple leaf. I’d been writing a long piece of fiction about rural life during a pandemic before I found myself in a pandemic so I had a lot to study about human behavior and myself. I was just beginning a new part of that story when covid came, fictionally and personally too. I was getting out more. I was missing certain city streets. I’d bought new boots. I figured I could still get around.

Not many people just dropped by and the paintings accumulated privately mostly. I reworked old things at leisure, luxuriated in the absurdity. In spite of the slowdown I’m lucky enough to be having a little show next month, November, down the blacktop, miles from here. The paintings interspersed through this text will be among the paintings in that show. They’re just pictures I took on my phone but they’ll have to do tonight.

I’m thinking of maybe calling the show “peripheral vision”, or view maybe. I just got the pictures all assembled in one room and looking at me this week which is one fun part of having a show. That “Wtf have I been doing?” moment of overview. work patterns. I’m not sure how everything will work regarding gallery procedure in lock down. I imagine things must be like an old fashioned private view, and will also take place on line. I’ll keep you posted here. I’m on Facebook at https://www.facebook.com/rockylgreen and on twitter as textandimages.