Arlington Arts, May 17, 2020A
This week the artists chose the words ANXIOUS, COURAGE, MOMENTS, STILL AND COMMUNITY.
“By seeing the artists’ expression it allows us to think more deeply of the meaning of the words during this specific moment in time. This connection through watching the art making process gives us a sense of stability while living through this unknown territory of a pandemic.”
~ Cynthia Connolly, curator of Special Projects, Arlington Arts.
Kate wrote, “This week’s toilet paper adventure in this series illustrates the word “anxious” with a roll dangling precariously on a string. The wonderful people I live with kindly tolerate (and even appreciate!) my toilet paper still lifes around the house, including this one hanging from the basement ceiling.”
“‘COURAGE’ permits us to face extreme dangers and difficulties without fear. Although it’s hard not to feel a sense of fear after two months of Covid-19, I am starting to feel like it’s time for me to “fight back” a bit. I may not be able to change our current reality, but I can fight back mentally and choose my response to it. In this week’s sketch, I have used a masked Luchador to represent the fight. He is surrounded by the ultra-structural morphology exhibited by the coronavirus and has just delivered a direct punch to one of them.” — David Amoroso
“I document a lot of moments daily by taking close-up photos on my phone. But putting them into a painting was crazy. First, the printer wasn’t at the studio anymore—I had brought it home when the building closed to the public at the beginning of the lockdown. So I made pictures on newsprint. But drawing is not my thing and the color pencils on newsprint didn’t work, so I packed everything up and brought it home where I haven’t worked in 10 years!
Letters and shapes in the pictures spell “Moments” but I also enjoyed playing across languages. I am from India and the word Mohe is part of the Hindi song that played on my radio as I drove. In Hindi, moment is ghadi, which I wrote in the underpainting. Then I saw that in the Eddie Redmayne moment we see his watch, and the word for watch is also ghadi. But ghadi in another Indian language, Marathi, means to fold and I had a drawing of my unfolded laundry in there! Ultimately this artwork took much longer than expected so many invisible moments here. I used mixed media including acrylic paint, color pencils, glue, and markers.” — Sushmita Mazumdar is a visual artist who has a studio in Buckingham.
Maribeth writes, “STILL is presented as a question (Is this still happening?), an answer (Yes, still.), and a state of being (I remain still.). Like Dr Fauci, STILL delivers sobering news.
Collage is a process about making choices, sometimes subconsciously. Studio detritus is often a beginning element of my collages. Here, a background is a section of an abandoned painting that suggests a tunnel and a journey. The U.S. Post Office (Yay!) delivered another element of the piece, Minecraft-like envelope innards. The stitching references the passing of time.”
“I chose digital illustration as my medium to represent a heartless system, where all we have is each other. #WeKeepUsSafe. The word I chose isCOMMUNITY.“ — MasPaz is a muralist, art educator and conservationist who lives in Arlington Ridge.
Return to Words To Art 2020 page