It is Spring in a vestigial Los Angeles, as the bustling, outdoor enthusiasts who comprise the United States’ second-largest city populous, are confined to their homes due to a COVID-19 quarantine mandate. Four million Angelenos, who are ready for the tepid season’s social gatherings, concerts, restaurant reservations, beach and canyon outings, Dodgers games, and gallery openings, are able to see no one and go nowhere. Artists included, as interaction with the world, necessary for creative inspiration, is abruptly as arid as the climate.
Ricardo Garcia, a native artist Angeleno, stares at his blank canvas. It is day 100 of his time in isolation as he calls it. He doesn’t have a clue as to what to paint. He picks away from the pointed wood end of his paintbrush with his teeth as nothing continues to come to mind. He is surrounded by his prolific art that he has painted over the years, years which he refers to now as the Illustrious-Pre-Covid Age.
The paintings are of intrepid women of all kinds of repute, and all posed and painted without judgment. Reciprocally, there are paintings of copious landscapes traveled: mountains, oceans, and the occasional abandoned Buick or hitchhiker free for the occasion. The subject matter encapsulates Garcia’s vision as a consummate understanding of the world. They are more than art models and terrains; they are friends, family; they are inspiration; they are life. Life rendered unrecognizable. Men, women, children equally as the city skyline and countryside bare their secrets and souls to him as he frantically paints each word, idea as truth.
Before the first COVID-19 death, Garcia remembers the air grew thin. He painted ominous social commentary, which looking back now, mirrored the horror we are all too soon to realize as loved ones and associates fall by the wayside by the hundreds, then by thousands, and still the millions. It is as if Death is a living being with its own story to tell. However, Garcia stands, and he stands alone. He is confined to his studio where his voice is caught by an echo not a mutual conversation, the connection between human beings. His paintings tell a story, he smiles to himself as he recalls all the journeys he has brought to life through each painting. His eyes stroll over the bodies, faces, and minds with a personified love gathered on blades of grass or under a sunrise where human nature juxtaposes with all the trappings of mortality.
Represented in his art, collectively, his paintings are one great work of prose spun from his life experience over the fossilized topography of his mind. With each brushstroke, the disconnect is magically supposed to disappear. Friends and family, collectors and critics, experts and novices from the past named bleakly “Ago” seem as out of place as an empty tube of paint as if from a dream Garica couldn’t swear he ever dreamt. He doesn’t have any idea where they are now. What encounters they have tasted, tolerated, or desired. Are they even alive? What he knows for certain is that the canvas is blank. Woman is rendered a still life of female. As landscape and cityscape are transposed into graveyards. COVID-19 has segregated humans from humanity. Man from himself as no witness bares his existence and Garcia as an artist struggles to extend his experience of isolation with a laryngitis-riddled voice.
The galleries are closed. And, the virtual reality or limited admission exhibitions exclud an essence mandatory to art exposure and impact: connection and conversation. The artist sits in an armchair, staring at the Zoom meeting and scoffing at the six-foot separated designated viewing circles of mouthless viewers. Unanimated, he recoils from the lack of interaction. Garcia has nowhere to go and neither does the art. Garcia muses.
Is an artist a witness: A witness to the ubiquitous weather of the human experience rain or shine, with the sharpest of senses to expose him to all the conditions of the world? And is this vulnerability all perfunctory as this artist defined by his sensory perceptions vacant as the canvas when the world is barred to him through a global pandemic? May he merely conceptualize loneliness and solitude as an art study? That was what his friends advise him for a great painting during the hours of phone call conversations, which leave him too exhausted to paint. Anyway, he concludes there is no truth to disclose; everyone knows they’re lonely and the government lied because they’re infected, dead, or just afraid. Garcia explaines the complexity of beauty. He paints beauty as truth, yet his art studio is the beauty of only the white canvas exposed in a jail cell or quiet room incarceration. The universal truth is reduced to the individual and this one, in particular, perceives no truth to render him productive. “But”, his friends proclaim, “all this free time to paint is what every artist dreams of”, as if this free time isn’t really a time-out chair facing the corner as the Earth’s rotation and the glory of nature and humanity is fading due to a memory depletion virus called desolation.
Depression set in. It began after a windfall of confusion. Racing thoughts dubious if not dishonored crowd Garcia’s mind. One beer. Maybe two. Lead to more than three until the thoughts break down into words and words into syllables and finally silence. The silence is a void, a perfect space for depression to live. The depression will last. Depression is Garcia’s old friend that invited itself to stay. The chaotic energy that needles every pore of his skin is sequestered elsewhere as his muscles weigh heavy and his strength degenerates in varying stages of atrophy. There is nowhere to go from here. As opposed to a world quarantine, Garcia is quarantined inside his own body. There is much discussion about the artist plagued by depression and the roots of its cause. Ask Vincent Van Gogh as each century suffers a plague and each artist a plague of the mind. Garcia remains indignant of medical opinion as his movement, connection, drive and eventually every quality of his life are diminished. Another beer maybe since restaurants deliver alcohol. He sleeps. Once he awakens, he sleeps again. He dreams of the Vincent van Gogh painting, his brilliant 1889 work, Irises, in the garden of the psychiatric hospital of Saint-Rémy-de-Provence. He dreams of the artist as he captured the colorful view of incongruous pedals that contrasted the corridors of his confinement. Garcia hears the artist whisper in his unconscious ear, “I put my heart and my soul into my work, and have lost my mind in the process.”
Again, he awakens, and he is truly awake– an impetus was alive in him. The lingering percipience of Van Gogh’s words propose to Garcia the purpose of task or happening. He coalesces thoughts of workmanship and significance into complex emotions and ideas… lines and colors position themselves like an intersection of points of view, as concept and image unfold, find balance, and propose solutions. He is effective at getting up and painting. He postulates art, and compositions are assembled. Everything is still in place: the parks, the highways, the romances, and the truth are all where they once were. They even have evolved. Garcia recalls Swinburne’s line from the poem “The Garden of Proserpine”, “Time stoops to no man’s lure”. He visualizes experiences of travel, courtship, exploration, healing…He visualizes life among the living. He sees he is alive. He rolls out canvas because he is again kinetic. The paint flows; the brushes bend; the images emerge. The time-out chair is empty. He, too, has evolved. He understands that evolution doesn’t mean improvement. He amends his definition of art and beauty.
Art is beauty; however, beauty can be hideous. His work assimilates the twisted truth of his Covid experience as beautiful. He replaces his previous vapid pandemic-age mentality with a salubrious introspection. He jestes to himself about his weight loss and new perspective. He remembers collaborations with old friends. He rememberes the fight he was born to win: the fight to bust through the hatch of discontent and design his reality on his own terms. Subsequently, he realizes his gift of life. He survived. That is his destiny. After all, his legs still walk, his hands still grasp, and his mind still connects. Those who have perished appear in his work. Those who mourn, too. Garcia mourns. Garcia traverses the scenes as he depicts the new world reality. The artist prevailed. Art did not fall to COVID. Art is triumphant.
Anna Broome is a Los Angeles based artist and art writer for publications, including Art Voices, Boryana Books and Spectrum Publishing. Broome has produced a live-performance-art show, the Anna Broome Room at Art Share LA, since 2013.
