Oil on Panel November 2020 12 x 28 inches

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Corona Journal Entry Stopped en route to Medlyn Farm when I saw a crazy beautiful thing happening. Pulled over and started to paint on the panel I had intended to rework. Never have reworked on sight and only a few times in the studio. But I needed that big panel at the moment so abandoned the Medlyn plan. The light went behind the trees so fast I was still thinking how to approach it before everything had utterly changed. Decided to leave as is and come back tomorrow if I can get away and the weather is similar. Now home, I’m thinking I may just leave as is. I like the half-drawn beginning-ness of it. I never work in layers separated by days, en plein air. But in the studio I used to often think my underpaintings were better than the rest. Perhaps that’s because I started drawing as a little girl and started painting so much later. Different levels of relative competence. I love drawing. But painting fires me up in a way that is more addictive. Maybe in part because it is more like jumping off a cliff. This being a journal where I feel somewhat naked, showing awkward learning experiments, it seems appropriate to show the WIP underwear. § In the past two days I spent a total of 4.5 hours on the phone and computer to schedule Covid Test and get opinion from my Primary and others on when I should get it and what to tell people with whom I had been in contact. Another 5 hours of emailing and talking with F&F to share info. This is not a complaint. It is data. There was not a reliable guide to follow. All the local testing options were booked for the next three days. We are doing our own informal contact tracing because there is no system to use. There is much debate about whether the kind of exposure I had was dangerous to me or to others. What is the incubation period? How soon after exposure should we be tested? Is once enough to be sure I’m not an asymptomatic spreader? Where to go? How long to get results? Are all tests equally reliable? What if I get the wrong test? It seems the only news we’ve had is about these and other Covid issues, but at the moment I need it all distilled so I can take the best action, where is it? All this, it seems, is because we have not been focused, as a nation, on assimilating scholarship and information, building systems and capacity and developing standards. Instead we have been having a nasty election cycle and even debating whether the Covid Pandemic is some kind of hoax.