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Tucson COVID Tales No. 27: Thinking of Coltrane in a Time of Virus, by Donivan Berube

October 29, 2020 |

When the Time of the Virus began, every headline might as well have come with a question mark. Reports were conflicting, information was ongoing, and change quickly became the only constant.

A year after my solo debut Endlessly Won’t Last for Long, I’m releasing my sophomore LP, Truth in Constant Change for Now, made over the course of quarantine. It was a tumultuous but inspired year, scored by constant waves of focus over obscurity, persistence over surrender. It felt quite natural then to “Coltrane” myself in the studio throughout that time. In the jazz giant’s composition of A Love Supreme, he reportedly locked himself in a small room until emerging with a complete work. The COVID closures became a similar allowance for uninterrupted coffee and music-making, only to surface for a daily bike ride on the Tucson Loop.

Themes grew to weave intimacy and isolation into a polyrhythmic heartsong of jazz chords and sudden redirection. If “love became the walls in which to quarantine us,” then “what got between us?” You can find some answers by listening to the first three tracks in the link below. You can preorder a copy of Truth in Constant Change for Now and hear other music here

Donivan Berube has traveled the world as a musician. He has worked as an English teacher in Peru, a librarian in Big Sur, a luthier in Arizona, and taken solo long-distance bicycle tours across the United States and Iceland. Visit him at https://www.donivanberube.com

BLOOD WIDOW is a Halloween Treat with a Supernatural Twist

October 23, 2020 |

by Jennifer Powers

Fall is when our movie watching fancy turns to the scary and unsettling. Shadows grow long in the late afternoon, and the extended nights summon us to explore the dark side of our imaginations. The chills are extra-special when the action takes place close to home.

In Blood Widow, filmed in and around Tucson, young women are disappearing. Detectives Valentine and Stokes suspect a serial killer and soon pick up a trail from terrifying events across the city. Unbeknownst to the detectives, the last survivor of a mysterious clan is feverishly searching for the same person, with dark plans of her own. Should she reach the killer first, the detectives will be dealing with an evil unlike any they have experienced.

Blood Widow was directed by Brendan Guy Murphy, who co-wrote the script with Dominic Ross. This is the third film for production company MurphySpeaking Films, founded by Brendan in 2007, the same year his first film, Limbo, was released. Story Time Fables came out in 2010 and was featured in the Arizona International Film Festival and the Stepping Stone Film Festival in India, and it was a semifinalist in the Oaxaca Film Festival in Mexico.

Recipient of the 2008 Buffalo Exchange Arts Award, Brendan says he was inspired to make Blood Widowwhen he began to wonder what would happen if a malevolent supernatural evil encountered a morally evil madman. “The idea turned into a treatment, the treatment became a script, and as the right cast of characters came off the pages, it was time to make the film,” says Murphy.

Shot on location in Southern Arizona, Blood Widow taps into some of the psychic power embodied in Hotel Congress, El Rancho Diablo, and the Slaughterhouse—all of which have infamous stories in their histories, from gangster hideouts to murder. The three are also long rumored to be haunted. Danny’s Baboquivari Lounge, Petroglyphs, and Gentle Ben’s Brewing Company generously agreed to allow their businesses to be used by the filmmakers as well.

“Tucson and its surrounding areas are filled with wonderful filming locations,” says Murphy. “We were fortunate to have been granted access to numerous settings that created the unique texture and sense of place that anchors the film.”

As an actor, Murphy has been featured in many films, commercials, and music videos, including Lucky U Ranch, Wastelander, and the Alex Italics award-winning short film Sheltered Love. In Blood Widow, he surrounds himself with a diverse cast of players, primarily from Tucson, who bring an authentic Southwest feel to the movie. Melissa Alejandra, born in Sonora, Mexico, and raised in Tucson, is a dancer/singer/choreographer who has performed nationally and internationally. Dallas Thomas has acted in film, web series, commercials, and onstage, including multiple appearances with the stellar Rogue Theatre Company. Hector Ayala, a native Tucsonan, has appeared in several films and made numerous appearances with Borderlands Theatre.

Veteran actor James Craven, whose resume includes a long list of television and movie credits, has appeared on Broadway and in the European tour of Gospel at Colonus with Morgan Freeman. The Minneapolis-based actor is a long-time member of the Penumbra Theater Company there, where he has appeared in more than 35 shows.

There is a wealth of local talent behind the camera, too. Art director Cori DiSimone and makeup artist Sonia Campbell work their dark arts to magically eerie effect. Director of photography Antonio Villagomez and sound mixer and editor James Wan came to Arizona from Ecuador and Hong Kong respectively. They combine to create a thrillingly atmospheric cinematic chiller. Dan Singleton composed the film score.

Blood Widow was produced by Brendan Guy Murphy, Sergio Kardenas, Antonio Villagomez, and Scott Hellon and is distributed by Indican Pictures through Lionsgate Studios. It is available for streaming on Amazon Prime and for rent and purchase on Amazon Prime, Google Play, YouTube, Apple TV, Fandango Now, Vudu, and Microsoft.

This year, make Blood Widow your Halloween date for a good, frightening time in Tucson. Death will never be the same.

Blood Widow trailer:

Tucson COVID Tales No. 26: Nature and Art, by Gene Hall

October 21, 2020 |

As the campus closure approached in mid-March, I wasn’t sure how my job as an entomologist at the University of Arizona would be affected. Eventually, I was given “essential personnel” status and continued working on campus in a vacated, locked, dead-quiet building, but for months the majority of my work hours were still spent remotely at home, not knowing how long the shutdown would last.

A bit of a loner by nature, even I could feel the heaviness of imposed isolation. My routine is restricted to home and campus during the workweek, groceries on the weekends. My girlfriend lives in her own casa, we instigate social distancing when necessary based on our own social activities, and we’re grateful for when we’re together. Jimmy and Cesar, my canine companions, sustain me during these strange times. While necessary, wearing a mask hasn’t lessened the surreal feeling of the pandemic, each social experience is like attending a dangerous masquerade ball.

Works in Progress

Art, specifically painting, has helped me cope with the uncertainty caused by COVID concerns. It took a few weeks to regain my creative stride. Similar to other artists I know during this time, there were periods of stalled productivity when initially I thought isolation would provide more focus on my work. Galleries have been closed since March and show schedules delayed, so I’m painting without deadlines, which has pros and cons. The goal is to move forward, not allowing outside forces to sabotage the dedicated focus in the studio. 

Dragon Fruit

Nature is another essential element in my life. It has always fascinated and inspired me. Among my earliest memories are those of animals and plants outdoors, as well as drawing them from photos in books. We’re all part of nature, and humans represent one of millions of species inhabiting this planet. The incredible biodiversity on Earth is beautiful and enlightening, demonstrating the interconnectedness of all species, how fragile life can be, and the balance needed to maintain the world’s survival. The rampant greed and arrogance of our species doesn’t always agree with those concepts, a deeper discussion for another time.

When life becomes overwhelming, nature and art have always been my salvation, anchors for when I’m set adrift. While my art generally contains natural elements (for me it’s unavoidable), during the pandemic it’s become increasingly more grounded in and informed by nature. To quote David Hockney’s appreciation of Chinese art, “They say you need three things for paintings: the hand, the eye, and the heart. Two won’t do.”

My first COVID-period painting was a spirit animal, a bird of the family Corvidae, an unintentional play on words. I continue to produce a body of work inspired by the wonderment of nature while experiencing the beautiful, at times harsh and deadly, world around us.

Corvidae

We’re probably going to be in this wretched pandemic a while longer. Enjoy life and have a bit of fun.

Gene Hall is an entomologist and curator at the University of Arizona.

Tucson COVID Tales No. 25: Keeping the Music Alive, by Gary Mackender

October 16, 2020 |

I’ve kept a spiral monthly calendar going since the late 1970s, and still have them all stashed away. The last several years have kept me quite busy—my 2019 calendar was chock full of gigs, and the 2020 spiral was looking the same. That book is around here somewhere, but I think it was last seen around March 15th. I somehow managed to go out with a bang since my last gig, on March 14th, was with Nancy McCallion, Danny Krieger, Heather Hardy, and Karl Hoffmann.

Then all jobs disappeared overnight in mid-March, including my standing gigs: a regular Sunday afternoon slot at Borderlands Brewing Company going on five years, along with first Wednesdays at Public Brewhouse, both with Kevin Pakulis; my once or twice a month Meet Me at Maynard’s gig with the Determined Luddites; and scattered work with Don Armstrong. And my band had a standing third Wednesday at Public and a fresh deal with the Hop Shop in Metal Arts Village for a monthly Tuesday residency to begin late March. Strange times, indeed.

I’ve been most fortunate to work with the musicians mentioned above who have developed their own sounds and original material. And my band, the Carnivaleros, has managed to survive (going on 19 years), performing mostly my songs as well. Despite the pandemic, I’ve managed to see these friends for short periods with a couple of live stream events with Don at Petie Ronstadt’s studio, a gig at 17th Street Market with the Luddites, and a session with Kevin at Duncan Stitt’s recording studio, which he’s decked out near total isolation for each player. I’m hesitant to venture out in public much more at this point, however. Thinking about how to navigate new musical realities has been an ongoing challenge, and with the daily political horror show that we’ve seen in 2020, I’ve been reticent to bring out the trumpets and market any new work. 

I will say that after March 14th a series of songs that I had just started to track in my studio blasted into full gear. I managed to solicit various musicians in town (primarily Karl Hoffmann, Connor Gallaher, Billy Yates, Cristina Williams, and Katherine Byrnes) and the Kansas City area (both Kelley J Hunt and Kelly E Hunt, along with brother Greg Mackender) to contribute to the project, and am happy to say that my 7th release is now pressed for your listening pleasure. It’s appropriately titled Waiting For the Big One, and the video below is the first track, called “Life I’ve Led.”

While being on stage satisfies my extrovert side, the other creative half of my life belongs to the visual arts. As a lifelong ambivert, the scales have been tipping quite heavily to the introvert side since March. Being both an avid reader and a visual artist who definitely likes to work alone, it’s been a relatively smooth transition to hole up all day. My wife is now working from home, and we’ve come close to developing a routine that works for us both. I am fortunate that my music and art studio is within walking distance—most of my days are spent there anyway. I made a wee video just for this COVID episode with work mostly produced this year.

Stay safe, be smart, be kind, vote.

Gary Mackender is a Tucson artist and musician. Find his tunes at www carnivaleros.com, and his visual work at www.garymackender.com

Tucson COVID Tales No. 24: Art and Solace, by Lex Gjurasic

October 14, 2020 |

As a child, I spent weeks at a time hospitalized with lung disease. Through spells of sickness, I took solace in my imagination, drawing and redrawing hundreds of versions of the same subject—each act of repetition pulling me deeper into a realm where sickness could not find me.

This spring, quarantining with my family, first subconsciously and then consciously, I found myself reaching for the same comfort—the comfort of repetition—that I had decades earlier. Like the confines of a hospital room in Seattle, my world shrank to the size of my studio. Through the meditative and soothing process of creating, the uncertainty of living in a country ravaged by a novel virus dissipated. I disappeared into other worlds—amalgamations of imagery existing somewhere between memory and imagination.

The result, Flower Mounds, is a cohesive series of verdant, undulating, biomorphic work. The series is an expression of my own exuberance for life and a love letter to the natural world, borne of a coping mechanism from early adolescence. Flower Mounds offers an escape into soft, surreal landscapes: a safe place to land.

Flower Mounds incorporates a wide breadth of unconventional materials, using only what I had already at home—including everything from sample house paint to mortar to Styrofoam. My commitment to the safety of quarantine unwavering, I began hand-making paper when my supply of other viable surfaces dwindled. To do this, I used, among other tools, a plastic kiddie pool. On delicate paper, I painted rolling hills carpeted with flowers.

In Flower Mounds I have painted the soft green mountains in the Land of Enchantment, the desolate Sonoran Desert bathed in its warm, soapy hues, and the fireworks show that is a Californian Super Bloom, a veritable explosion of glowing orange.

That joie de vivre manifested in Flower Mounds connects deeply to ritual, to nature, to the Queer virtue of radical happiness, and to celebration as a sacred act of grieving.

Lex Gjurasic is a Tucson artist. Visit her at http://www.lexgjurasic.com

Tucson COVID Tales No. 23: Teaching English on the Flat Screen, by Jennifer Makowsky

October 6, 2020 |

Not long before the pandemic hit, one of my students, Amir, walked over to me after class, holding out an Autozone advertisement for sun shades. “Teacher, what’s this?”

I took the ad. “It’s called a sun shade. It’s to make shade in your car.”

“Shade?”

I pointed out the window to a tree that cast a shadow across the front of the school. “Shade is the dark under the tree.” 

He gave me a bewildered look, so I squinted up at the overhead lights. “It’s too bright,” I said, grabbing a notebook and holding it over my head to block the light. Once the light was out of my eyes, I gave an overexaggerated sigh of relief. “Like in Tucson, we need shade because the sun is so bright and hot.”

He nodded. “I understand.”

My job as a teacher of English as a Foreign Language requires that I speak slowly and clearly, punctuate my words with hand gestures, and pantomime different language concepts. Before COVID, I spent a lot of time drawing pictures on the classroom whiteboard, showing students photographs, and miming actions. It wasn’t unusual for me to fall to the floor to convey “faint,” stagger around to express “dizzy,” and imitate the Charlie Brown walk of dejection to suggest “sad.”

REP Classroom, Pima Community College.

Where I teach adult English learners at Pima Community College’s Refugee Education Program (REP), the levels of English range from very beginning to advanced. One of the levels I teach is so basic that some students in the class do not know how to read in their native languages. A few have spent the majority of their lives in refugee camps and have never been to school. When we met face to face before COVID, I relied on body language and gestures to communicate with students. I think they had gotten used to me acting like a demented mime. 

Then the pandemic hit. Suddenly all the three-dimensional classroom interactions were reduced to one-dimensional exchanges on a flat screen. Like teachers everywhere, the teachers in REP scrambled to figure out how we were going to teach from home. Most of our students do not have laptops or iPads, and several have limited computer skills. Nearly all, however, have smartphones. And nearly all of the students use WhatsApp in order to communicate with their family and friends back home in their native countries. When we still had a physical classroom, students often talked to family members before class started, using WhatsApp video chat. I’d often walk into the classroom and find a student holding the phone up and telling me to say hello. Suddenly a student’s mother or husband in the Congo or Syria was in my Pima classroom, waving. I never anticipated I’d be using WhatsApp to communicate with my students right here in Tucson. But here we are.

In the months since we left the brick-and-mortar building, I have been taking photos of things around the house, making homework packets, recording audio pronunciation practice, and filming my son acting out various verbs. My fellow teachers have been filming themselves baking, cooking, and helping to set up internet access for their students. We’ve been striving to keep students connected and engaged. When we had a classroom, we played games like Concentration and running dictation, went on scavenger hunts around the neighborhood, received visits from professionals in the community, and took field trips to the library and local businesses. Now I meet students through WhatsApp chat. My former laughter-filled classroom has been reduced to my laptop and phone in the silent guest room at the back of my house.

Having said all that, this virtual time with my students has allowed me to connect with them in a different way. When I’m not talking to students on the phone or using chat in WhatsApp, I use the feature that allows me to video call students. I was hesitant at first because it almost felt invasive, but students welcomed me into their lives. When we video chat, I am transported to their apartments and houses and have come to know different family members. Students have answered my video calls at their jobs, from the hospital, the grocery store, from bed half-asleep, and even from the car wash. Once, Amir, who is a Lyft driver, tried to practice his English with me while driving. Naturally, I told him we better hang up before he had an accident. I forgot to ask him if he ever bought that sunshade.

Recently, when my mother was admitted to the hospital, my students flooded the class chat with pictures of hearts and sentiments like “May God heal your mother.” Amir sent a picture of the artificial flowers he keeps in his car to make it look nice for his customers along with a note that read: “I present these flowers to you for your mother.” 

The threat of the pandemic has forced me to reach behind the scenes into students’ lives and has offered them more of a glimpse into mine. It’s given us a connection we might not have otherwise known. Yesterday, as I was video chatting with my student Sam, he laughed after I clapped out the syllables to difficult. “You always did that in class and it helped,” he said, imitating me clapping. “I hope we can continue this.”

A lump rose in my throat. His comment not only reminded me of how much I miss my students, but it had also pinpointed the feeling my students offer me—the feeling of being seen and appreciated. It’s one of the many reasons I love my job. Even outside the 3D classroom, Sam had remembered the clapping habit, and it had helped him. He wanted to continue it. Maybe things on the flat screen aren’t so bad after all.

Jennifer Makowsky is a writer, educator, and University of Arizona alum. She is an East Coaster by birth and Tucsonan by heart.

Tucson COVID Tales No. 22: Empty School, by Renee Downing

September 28, 2020 |

In the time of the virus
the rainless summer
the unchanging days 
Absence sloshes through the halls
clocks tick to themselves
lights flicker unseen  

The children long scattered
to their trailers
their bunker apartments
their crowded shared rooms
Sunk into their phones, glass-eyed,
Look up for a moment
A glimpse and then gone,
waving goodbye, waving so long  

Renee Downing has lived in Tucson for nearly 50 years. She works at a school—which is empty.

Tucson COVID Tales No. 21: Trying to Make Do, by Jesse Schaefer

September 25, 2020 |

I was one of the first to arrive. L waited in the van, irritated at the very idea of risking a staff meeting, distanced or not. One by one we cautiously appeared on the patio, exchanging air hugs. Seating choices were gauged for safety, to the extent anyone could guess what that might actually mean. Distance, remember, distance. One or two people had to be reminded to back up, their smiles wilting into recognition that an automatic way of being was now on hold.

I knew it would be especially hard for M, who had already been nicknamed the “superspreader.” The reassurance of touch and impromptu massage for most of us was a daily affair, since restaurant work is a physically grinding machine. Separation in this group felt starkly unnatural.

Management handed out packets that had been prepared to deal with the DES, along with final pay plus a generous bonus. The three owners took turns speaking, three of my dearest friends. Tears fell, voices quaked. Dreams and money had been arrested and turned into smoke by something like a meteor. How to even fathom the catastrophe?

There was applause and the obligatory exchange of optimistic notes to try to cheer ourselves as we departed. I got back in the van and said, “Well, that could’ve been worse. Christ, I really do feel for the people who don’t have anyone, though, and are going to have to go through this alone.”

Two months later we would be calling it quits. But as for those early days, they were marked by attempts at orientation on uncertain ground. The DES proved to be the unrelenting migraine that Arizona politicians had designed it to be, second only to Mississippi in the stinginess of its unemployment benefits, with a gauntlet of bureaucratic hurdles to receive them. It felt like being deposited in a Kafka novel. The antique system relied on faxes as its preferred medium of communication, with time requirements that were so constricted they could only be intended by design to try to set up the applicant for failure. A letter would show up falsely claiming that I had been rehired by my employer and demand a faxed explanation from me by the next day. “Good thing I hadn’t been staying at L’s house when it arrived,” I thought in between curses.

Bartenders, servers, and cooks rallied though, we looked out for each other. Good phone numbers were DM’d around, inside dope from friends with contacts in the DES shared. An acquaintance from previous activist work got me in touch with a politician’s office. The shambling buggy was at least moving. Once I got my hands on a magic number and got through, the individuals working at the department proved nothing other than pleasant and helpful. Imagining them speaking to me buried at the foot of a mountain of faxes, I felt for them all. 

The old folks have been troublesome in the time of COVID. Questions that I thought would be answered with an obvious “no,” such as “Is getting a haircut or a manicure worth potentially dying for?” “Is walking into a Costco in the evening, after thousands of bodies have been through the store, to buy a mediocre pizza worth the possibility of grave sickness or death?” In the case of my maddening parents, the answer was a startling “Yes, what fine ideas!”

Fury management and exasperation have been a major component of my days. If only my folks were telling me lies in retaliation for my parade of anxiety-inducing fuckups over the years. It quickly became obvious that being an angry scold wasn’t going to work. Dropping the stick, I looked for an enticing carrot to dangle. “You know, Costco delivers. In fact, most grocery stores do curbside pickup or delivery.” The deadpan response was, “No, I need to pick my own meat and vegetables.”

The stupidity of that answer puzzled me, because the man who said it was not stupid. I couldn’t tell if I was now staring at somebody in a declined mental state that had just snuck past me at some point, or at a person who had arrived at some enviable pacific attitude toward his allotted time on earth. But the horrible death! How could that be an exit to treat nonchalantly? Alone, face down, lungs drowning in a hospital bed.

I called J, my oldest friend in the world, to complain. He and his wife had been weathering the worst of it in a tiny Brooklyn apartment. J was convinced he was just getting over it (and has since been tested and indeed was). “Yes, I see ‘corral your boomers’ is trending on Twitter,” he said. It became apparent that shopping trips and the like were not seen as drudgery for many cooped-up seniors, but instead were looked forward to as exciting social outings.

I could sympathize to some degree as the months pushed forward. There have been fleeting moments of communal monkey yearning in me to disappear into a crowd at a concert or ballgame, choices that have thankfully been taken away for now. I’ve had to back off with my anger. What was once me shouting has now been worn down into a disappointed shaking of the head. Like some parent of an obstinate drug addict who refuses to come to Jesus, I don’t want to know. I just hope they get away with it.

L and I could no longer avoid the need to break up. Even with grownup consensus, all the usual feelings of sadness and failure attended the coda. Showers and laundry loads became less frequent. The recycling bin swelled. I missed her dog, and when I could bracket out our regular cycle of arguments, I missed her too. The dark tide kept rolling into shore. A friend’s father died from the virus. Then the murder of George Floyd happened. Then the predictable spike in Arizona cases appeared. The Catalinas wouldn’t stop burning. The monsoon flirted, but took her love elsewhere. We might all be done with 2020, but it isn’t done with us. There is no cryogenic chamber to climb into. 

I wake up at 5:00 and drink down my daily medicine with a pint of water, then tend to a couple of ailing, heatstroked plants in the yard. The bats are at their hunt’s end, and soon the hummingbirds will be emerging from their torpor. By 5:30 I’m on my bike heading to the Santa Cruz. Through the dirt of the vacant lot, over the split crags of gray asphalt, offering a texture like Godzilla’s back, I make my way to Cushing and the freeway. Cutting a careful diagonal over the orderly menace of the trolley tracks, I pedal onto the bridge. The glass and steel of the headquarters of Caterpillar, those leaders in modified wilderness, are starting to warm into a coppery bloom in the dawn light.

Thinking Haydukeish thoughts, I head to the river path. There are fewer souls down here than I would expect, but I know by 6:00 the number will jarringly double. I glide past Desert Survivors. If bars and restaurants are going extinct, maybe I should go to work in a nursery? Surely it would make me a calmer and gentler person? I keep an eye out for wildlife—a friend had told me about some owl sightings in the last few days. The misery box of Pima County Jail looms on the right. I reflect on the horror of the place under normal circumstances, but now with COVID permeating, I feel a tinge of nausea.

I lob an imaginary bundle of dynamite à la For A Few Dollars More at a cell block wall. Just thought you ladies and gentlemen could use some fresh air. Ahead, trotting down a wash, the ashen gold of a coyote flickers. I pull over to admire it. Canis latrans, deity, survivor, ancient one. Our petite canid that never crossed the land bridge out in the Eurasian diaspora with his cousins. A true native that makes a mockery of government eradication attempts decade after decade. Ambling toward the water, head low, scanning for rodents, it offers me some kind of shape of resilience.

“I don’t know if American humans will turn out to be as talented as you, coyote,” I say to myself. A thousand things can still go wrong. I tip my hat in thanks for its appearance and continue on the sinuous desert path, with Auden’s line “uncertain and afraid” suddenly flaring into my consciousness.

Jesse Schaefer is an out-of-work bartender.

Tucson COVID Tales No. 20: The THREAD Project at Imago Dei School, by Mark Flanigan

September 23, 2020 |

We are doing fine here and trying our best to adjust and cope with all the changes Coronavirus has wrought in our local communities. Our school is doing okay under the circumstances and has entered a new partnership, which is a real silver lining in a bunch of dark clouds. We are very happy to be partnering with our local refugee friends and some of our immigrant school parents on our THREAD (Together for Hope, Resilience, Empowerment, and Development) Project, a fair-trade sewing cooperative housed at Imago Dei, paying our partners to sew all-cotton face masks at home (sewing machines and all materials and supplies included). To date, since March of this year, they have sewn more than 15,000 masks, earning money and helping to protect public health in Pima County.

Our local refugee partners are originally from a number of different countries, including Afghanistan, Iraq, Somalia, and the Democratic Republic of Congo. Our immigrant school parent partners are originally from Mexico. We are proud to be partnering with all of them, and fighting the Coronavirus together, on the THREAD Project here. For more info, please see: imagodeischool.org/thread/

Tucson COVID Tales No. 19: Returning to Art, by Dolly Spalding

September 21, 2020 |

When the quarantine began for me on March 19, I was six months into a period of creating art works after a 15-year hiatus. I had been inspired to begin again by a chance online encounter with a well-known Irish artist, Emlyn Boyle. We became friends on Facebook, and he encouraged me to resurrect my long-abandoned artistic endeavors, making crow quill dip pen and India ink drawings. And furthermore, he persuaded me to post the results on social media to see what sort of reaction I would get. After a period of experimentation with no specific concrete narrative, mostly abstractions that were received with enthusiasm on Facebook, I became interested in pursuing themes from Greek and Roman mythology and literature, which had been a passion from childhood. I made portraits of female characters from the Aeneid and the Iliad, then went on to draw as many goddesses as I could discover. After I exhausted the supply, I turned to those of the Norse pantheon until I swiftly finished with that group, Norse mythology being composed largely of male deities.

At this point, I was contacted by a former employer, Bruce Bayly, a math teacher at the UA, whose mobile science education program, the Physics Factory, I managed for a decade. It ceased operations in 2018, and I basically retired. It then became a smaller, more flexible program and is now run mainly by students with a small bus (the mobile part of the project). This “Cosmic Bus” displays, in its 38 windows, photos of female scientists and mathematicians. Bruce asked me to draw portraits of these women in my characteristic style for the bus, so since the end of May, that’s what I have been working on. I have done about fifteen so far, and because I post them on my Art of Dolly Spalding Facebook page, I have researched their biographies to accompany the portraits as text. It has been fascinating to learn about the lives of these remarkable women.

All such projects have kept me entertained and engaged and enlightened throughout the entire time of the lockdown. And my muse in Ireland keeps me inspired with his own art and daily encouragement.

Dolly Spalding graduated from the Boston Museum School and has been an artist, journalist, graphic designer, archaeologist, magazine and book editor, and administrator and board member for a number of not-for-profit organizations. She was for 10 years the manager of the Physics Factory, a science education outreach program.