watercolor markers. 2020
I’m Sara Rockinger. My piece is called Covid in the Garden of Good and Evil. It was originally inspired by images of exotic plant life I had come across in magazines like National Geographic. These plants were like nothing I had seen before. All were wild and bazar and some were even poisonous.
As the pandemic began to set in, I began to draw these unknown plant shapes from memory creating my own versions. As fear of the unfamiliar virus grew, so did these plants in my drawing. I knew then that this was about the virus and i knew I needed to depict evil clearly, though I’m not sure if my love of black and white with color came first or the idea of the snake came first.
Concept and presentation often compete in my head and in my work.
What started as play with a new medium and imaginary flora quickly became a serious expression of what we were living through.
My vision was to have three panels which transition from the unfamiliar and mysterious to the known and familiar. I falsely assumed it would follow the curve of the pandemic, that surely within three months we would have this whole thing figured out and it would be familiar and under our control, tamed like a rose bush. But that was not to be and so I completed this piece with the familiar but also the unfamiliar, all of which have run amok. What would I do if I could do anything during this pandemic? Maybe I would lay in my garden on my back watching the sky and let the plants grow up around me.