April 1 Update - Bree

I have three pretty general ideas for what I want to do the rest of the semester. They definitely need refining and better planning, and I am still working on what I would want to do for the last couple of drawings.

I'm planning to focus more on exactly how the virus is impacting myself and my loved ones.

The first drawing is going to be one of two ideas inspired by all of those photos I'm seeing of people trying to safely see the people they care about from a distance.

I grew up in an area dominated by working class families. Quite a few of my friends from my childhood are now waitresses, hairdressers, and bartenders, and therefore now out of work. One of my younger friends is 17; she had a baby a couple of months ago, dropped out of high school, and has been working waiting tables to support herself since. Her mother works in healthcare and cannot self-isolate and the baby's father refuses to self-isolate so her and the baby are staying with her grandparents right now. She's going through the first few months of being a mom without the help of her mother and is about to celebrate the baby's first Easter without most of her family present. Her mom is devastated; she stops by often to drop off supplies and says hi to her daughter and her granddaughter through the window. So, I maybe want to do that scene and using the colored pens remove the barrier in between them. Have everything but the window/wall in solid blue and leave the barrier in that light pink color. I don't know if that makes sense, but maybe next week I'll have a better sketch/finished project that makes it clearer what I'm saying. The other window idea is a bit lighter because I think most of these drawings will be pretty heavy. My family is pretty small and there are only three people I make sure I make time for when I am home: my father, my little sister, and my mother's mom. My grandma has some health issues that make her very at-risk, so she is trapped at home. Since I just traveled through a couple airports, it's not safe for me to see her face to face. I asked her if she would be the subject of one of these window drawings. She said yes and had the idea to be wearing her pajamas, making funny faces, and holding up toilet paper. 

My father is a police officer, and has been exposed to the virus four times that we know of; he's also working 12 hours/day, 7 days/week right now. He's still kickin' it and safe, but he is now sleeping in the driveway of the house to keep my sister safe. The department is doing a lot to prevent spread among his coworkers. At the station, they can't have roll calls and there can only be one officer in each room. So, I thought of doing a drawing of an empty roll call room with my dad at the front and implications of where it would have been filled with officers with the light pink. I also am considering doing a drawing of my dad in his cruiser all suited up with his mask, glasses, and gloves on.

In San Francisco, where I normally stay, the apartment is pretty high up. From our balcony, you can see the roof below us. I spend a lot of time on the balcony and looking out the window, and I started to notice this older man and woman trying to get exercise on the roof below us. They go for a couple laps around the roof, the man walks very slowly, and the woman helps him along. I can't see much details and am not sure whether the scale I'll be working on allows for it, but I'd like to do an empty cityscape that is quite large with them being the only two figures in it. Their smallness will emphasize the isolation I'm sure they are especially feeling if they are limited to doing laps around their rooftop for exercise.

Finally, my friend Raj passed away this week. I'm still struggling with knowing I will never be able to hug him again, and being apart from my Duke friends who I know are also struggling with the loss makes it much harder. The anxieties and stresses of the past couple of weeks have blended with mourning, so it's hard for me to understand exactly what I am feeling. I wanted to do a portrait of Raj smiling, but it's unclear to me whether that is respectful given that I don't really know his family at all. I also don't think it's super relevant to the coronavirus theme, but like I said it's hard to work out what's happening right now.