At the beginning of January 2020, I decided to invest in 50 9x12 panels and challenge myself to do a painting a week, Though other projects delayed my start until near end of February. No great works, but a way to improve my painting and explore it more, since I'd been focused in the past on black & white works and collages. I found almost at once that the small format changed the way I work, and I am not really a fan of working so tightly. But I plug away at it. Here are the first 9. I took a long break to do a landscape project when the weather warmed up enough and stopped raining in spring.

Then the Covid 19 crisis hit. That began to effect the paintings. They have become a kind of chronicle of the year.

Some of them are particular exercises: #1 was done with a limited palette of leftover paint from a previous work: all hues were created with 3 colors (raw umber, pthalo blue, purple) and white. #2 was an exercise in painting the negative space, and was created by painting the plant shapes loosely in washes, then the negative space (pale yellow) around them. Harder that way, but interesting exercise. #5 was painted again with limited palette and just a palette knife, no brushes. #6 was born of contemplating the 1918 Spanish flu pandemic, in which my great aunt Helen died. This is from a black & white picture I have of her hanging in my hall. Hard to describe the emotion this evoked in me.

Obviously there are more to come, and I skipped some weeks, but this covered the first 6 months of a very stressful and strange year.

So I've had a design in my files since I first created the prairie garden of installing a 'dry stream bed' garden feature. After the shop was built and my broken concrete patio was replaced with a curving one, the shapes emerged more clearly and I thought the lockdown was a good time to start digging.

Nothing like digging ditches to relieve stress. Granted, with bum shoulders and age, it took me a lot longer than it would have my son, but he was on lockdown too. I worked away for weeks a few hours at a time, lining the beds with weed barrier as I went. Finally it was gravel time. That was a more focused labor to get it done before my lawn mower guys had to get past the pile in front of the gate!

The final stage was planting and edge treatments. I worked with what I had: I couldn't install large boulders so this is a 'gentle stream'.