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