Quarantine

I was living with my parents in Burnsville and working in Minneapolis public schools when the pandemic started in earnest in 2020. When they shut down the schools and then shifted to remote learning for the rest of the school year, I suddenly had a lot of free time, and very little I could do with it. Perhaps you've heard this story....

I filled my time for those first few months by driving to my favorite small company, Indigo Tea Company, buying a latte and a snack, and then eating it in the parking lot while I drew something in the landscape around me. (Indigo Tea Company, if you live in the Twin Cities metro area, is a place you should absoltuely check out. It's a small family-owned business that's driven by the owner's passion for tea. It has a beautiful interior space, including both tables with chairs you can sit at and tatami mats with short tables you can sit/kneel on, and a rack of tea cannistaers so you can smell the flavors before you try them. Support small businesses!)

I started this practice with the thought that any landscape can be interesting and even beautiful if you choose to engage with it and look deeply. EVen if I drew the same place over and over, I would try to find something different to focus on every day. SInce I had no idea how long the shut down would last, it was a very open-ended project, and I figured I'd just see how long I could keep it up, whether the shut down or my attention span lasted longer.

I always started a new picture every day, but I didn't always actually managed to finish. At the time I thought I'd come back and finish later, since there seemed to be infinite time. Sometimes I did. But sometimes I didn't, and since these were nearly all drawn in person rather than from photos, I wasn't able to go back and finish things once too much time had passed, because the seasons changed and the landscapes didn't look the same. Now some of the trees have been cut down. So, there are not as many images as you mgiht expect when I say--my attention outlasted the circumstances.

Digital art of an empty coffee shop in reddish brown and pale cyan colors, with a focus on how the light reflects off the wooden tables and chairs, and the emptiness of the space. Digital art of the Indigo Tea Company exterior viewed from the parking lot, in early spring under a gray sky with all bare trees and brown grass in the background. There's a little sign on the front door with an arrow pointing right to the drive-through, because it was closed to walk-in customers because of the pandemic. Digital art of a green semi trunk and some weird red vehicle I don't know how to explain, in the parking lot at Indigo. Under a gray sky, the grass is still brown, and there's a tree next to the trucks with fully bare branches. Digital art of a little strip mall with a gas station viewed from across the street, with townhouses in the background. It's early spring and raining heavily, so the sky is a fairly dark blue-gray, but the street is shiny and reflecting lights from the gas station. There's a tree several stories taller than the buildings and pole with wires right next to it. Digital art of a parking lot by a strip mall with two blue SUVs shining under a blue sky, and a little tree between us and the cars groing out of a median. The tree has little red buds because the spring is progresing. Digital art of a Starbucksand the surrounding parking lot right after getting a little bit of snow, which is now on the awnings and in the cracks of the rock gardens. I used purple for shading in this one to try and get a cooler feel. Digital art of a a tree on a hill during a spring snow flurry. The hill is partly white but the brown grass is poking through, and the sky is a mix of blue and white and darker storm clouds. Behind the single tree is a fence and some other more distance trees, all still brown but not quite bare. Digital art of telephone wires and clouds behind them. The sky is mostly blue with a few white clouds. Below the grass is starting to turn green but there's some leftover half-melted snow. The trees aren't green, but they have big brownish red buds.
Digital art of an empty coffee shop in reddish brown and pale cyan colors, with a focus on how the light reflects off the wooden tables and chairs, and the emptiness of the space.