"Living in Interesting Times"

There is a curse that is associated with "living in interesting times".  In history these times were marked by plagues, wars, dictators but also by the birth of civilization and the renaissance.
Artists have always been the "historians" of these periods of great change. We bear the burden of taking something like this and making art from it or trying as best we can to explain it through color, movement, sound, etc.
 The world as we knew has changed.  It is not going to be like it was whether the country opens back up this month or next or even later.  We are different.  We will have grown.  We will have matured.  We will have weathered the storm, hopefully.  We are living through one of the greatest stories still to be written.  
I deal with my stressors by painting and hiding in my studio. The past 6 weeks have been a forced labor camp for most artists that I know and they have been very creative and productive for the most part. 
As we slowly see the light at the end of the tunnel, we all need to come together as support.  Little things during this very difficult period will mean a lot to people and especially to artists, who already feel the world a little more than the average person.  
That life force or "zip" as Clifford Still called it, is heavy in our hands as we go into the unknown.  It is up to us to fix the problems that we know exist and come out of this better than we went into it.  
Corrections needed to be made in the way we lived our lives and in our business.  The big, the gaudy, the reality series way of living is most likely not going to be so in vogue once the "Interesting Times" give way to normal living again.  
The world is now at 7.5 billion people.  The Empire State building which was the tallest building in the world for nearly 40 years is now number 34.  Collectively we have loved "big" over the past few decades.  Big museum exhibitions, big ticket items, and big homes.  Will we start to question the direction we were going?  Will the public now want art that is personal to them where they dont need a docent to explain every detail?  Who's to say but we are definitely in for a change going forward. 
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