Work in the Times of Covid Part 2
The lockdown came across while I was trying to change my ticket to Peru that was due for June to go and see my family, but frontiers got closed and was an impossible mission. One morning the Peruvian embassy called at 7 am saying that they have a flight I could jumped in and go back home , only had 2 hours and a half hours to get to Heathrow in time , but at the time I knew that if I was going , was not going to be able to come back any soon, and wouldn’t have a place to work and finish my course, so I was at 6:30 am , just woken up , in bed still ,making serious life decisions, I decided to stay and finish my course no matter what. Had lots of mixed guilt feelings for not going to see my family and choose painting instead of them, remembering my ancestors doing the same thing (abandoning family for their creative career) and putting that in mind did help a bit. Thinking, ok, is in my genes.
Having to move from the studio space to my place wasn’t a hard thing, still not ideal but doable. I felt blessed and very grateful at the time of realising I had this free space at home to work with, so I turned the spare bedroom we had on the first floor into a studio, was a double room but not big enough for the work I still wanted to do, my assemblages on a bigger format; so decided to use the room for drawings and written work together with canvases that may fit in the room and work with oils on them.
So, I create a few pieces of work up there and at the same time, got hold of some wood panels I saw on the tip to work on them and set them up in the garden. At the time had ran out of canvases and didn’t have much money to buy new ones, my rent was 1/4 of it at the time and finances where uncertain. So, I did my last piece of work with left over spray paint that we use for the Aldi’s mural project in London rd., cling film and my own recycled rubbish portraying myself through it in a decadent landscape. Set all my spraying paints and tools in the Wendy house and worked outdoors, weather was a bit of nuisance, not allowing me to work when it rained, but at the same time the rain didn’t ruin the work at all, so was happy about it.
One of the uncomfortable things of having the oil painting studio upstairs was the lack of sink to wash brushes and stuff but it had other benefits like the wonderful view that make me do a few drawings, an airy and very light room with a nice feeling to work in there.
So, the fact I can do work helped me to deal with the virus threat and family abroad. The lock down also allowed me to just do work cause there nothing else to do and distract from it. —Ursula Vargas