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

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.

Category: TUCSON COVID TALES