Portrait of Isolation - Yellow Dress

J was one of the first people I exchanged emails with - her emails were very stark – missing friends and fearing for the safety of her family - and feeling the days merging into one. Of all the paintings this is probably the darkest … although … and this was a subconscious inclusion I hadn’t realised until Justine, who had also been struggling herself at times during lockdown, sent me this poem, and she describes Yellow as a colour of Hope.

Yellow Dress of Hope

The cloth can't hide me caving in upon myself,

Nowhere to go, nobody to see...

I might as well be naked, dumb, mute.

Falling backwards into a black hole of daily stats, numbers

The relentless news of deaths, survivors, tragedies,

Wrestling with it all in a twilight world

Each day morphs into the next,

An unbroken routine, wrenched from the life I knew

I feel like neither man nor woman

Only the meagre stool I sit on grounds me

Angular and awkward, my tired body tries to find some comfort, peace,

While my mind cannot.

Even my hands have grown a new dimension

To cradle my ponderous head

I despair,

Yet I still wear my yellow dress of hope.