Wooded Grey and Black

The sunny weather’s left us.  Overcast most of the day.  Cold again. I think I need help.  New York is now the epicenter of the COVID-19 contagion and we’re all stuck at home, quarantined.  I have woken up in the morning with work that needs to be doing.  But I come out and as soon as the natural light becomes sufficiently strong I bring a chair or two over and place them around the scene of my addiction.

The Hieronymus Bosch painting “The Garden of Earthly Delights” is replete with images we can all likely recognize at a glance.  The tortured man with his hindquarters being worked on while he stands in boat like feet that rise to tree trunk legs.  I bought a one-thousand-piece jigsaw puzzle of the masterpiece and we’ve been adding to it, bit by bit during our quarantine period. 

I really have no business investing an hour in finishing out the left part of the triptych this morning.   But I do.  And what happens, interestingly is that one’s eyes become accustomed to ever so slight variations of color.  You need a dry ochre color.  This piece is either the chair that the frog man is sitting on or the body of the instrument to the left, it cannot be the dry lawn that you need. 

Later, when I’m out throwing seeds around the lawn, putting out provisions so that all the wildlife of the property will frolic out into a place where I have a clear line of sight.  And, unwittingly I’m looking at the grass differently.  This grass is still has a thin covering of snow unlike the grass on the bluff.  That wooded area is full of slight differences in pale wooded grey and black space in between.  I think about my dear friend who is an artist and consider that this I probably more like the way he views the world, after spending hour an after hour considering the slightest differences in color. 

Sunday 03/22/20