We all know how bad this year of 2020, the year of the Covid-19 pandemic has been. No need to go into all we’ve been through here.

I’ve always dabbled in art, and had joined the local art guild last year, with the idea that it would provide opportunities to learn and get better. The guild hosted a Plein Air art event in the springtime of 2019, and my best friend Kathy and I (neither of us had painted in a while) decided to sign up for it. We figured it was a way to push ourselves into creating. En Plein Air painting is simply painting the scene before you, outside. If you’ve ever been in a town or city and seen a scattering of artists at their easels busily painting a street scene, you were witnessing a Plein Air event.

We live in a rural area, and have limited access to publicly accessed painterly scenes. One of the best was The Barn at the Hutchinson Unit of the Rappahannock River Valley National Wildlife Refuge. Only three miles from my house and just off the main road, it was easily accessible, and was a beautiful subject to paint.

Kathy and I practiced Plein Air painting in the weeks leading up to our artist guild’s event. One of the places we went, of course, was to Hutchinson’s.

The day we were there, it was incredibly windy. I tried to paint The Barn with acrylic paints, and my canvas (and easel at one point) kept blowing over and into the grass. Frustrated, I gave up and joined Kathy near The Barn. She was busily (and beautifully) using her watercolors to paint a smaller farm building nearby, and was doing it successfully because The Barn blocked the wind.

Kathy suggested that I tried painting the smaller building. I grumbled that I’d brought only one canvas. She had sketch paper and a set of inexpensive soft pastels with her, and offered them. After watching her paint for a while, I gave in and did as she suggested. I created a quick, done on wrong paper, badly drawn pastel painting of the small building. I took it home to finish it, but it was still pretty bad. But I saved it because it was one of my new first efforts at getting back to creating art, and I figured that looking at it later would reassure me that I was getting better.

In January 2020, PC (pre-Covid), I took a photo of The Barn at Hutchinson’s and used it as a reference, to try out a set of watercolor pencils in my watercolor journal. Again, the effort was pretty rudimentary, but I was practicing with a scene that I loved. I planned to go back again and again, and let The Barn be the witness that, as an artist, I was slowly getting better. Hopefully, anyway.

Then I did a version of The Barn in pastels. I liked it better than the watercolor–not great, but better. I was looking forward to capturing The Barn in various seasons and times of day.

Then the pandemic hit. And things got weird and strained and strange, for all of us. And while I was busy losing myself in a big writing project I set aside my art brushes and pencils, and for months had absolutely no interest in picking them back up. I thought of it as pandemic-induced artist’s block. Recently, I finally began painting again. I decided that, on a nice-weather day, I would return to Hutchinson’s and create another version of The Barn.

Then the unimaginable happened. As we were driving by the refuge, we saw that The Barn wasn’t there anymore. There was just a big blank empty space where it used to be. I felt slightly sickened as I stared at the nothingness left.

 My husband and I went for a drive yesterday, and I asked him to pull into the refuge, so I could see what was left of The Barn.

Nothing but bulldozer marks, and small piles of debris and soil. In the photo below, the site of The Barn is in the foreground, and the site of the small building is in the gap in the tree line in the distance.

I contacted a volunteer group for the refuge via Facebook earlier today, and asked them if they knew what had happened. In their response, they said that they missed The Barn, too. And that due to budget cuts at wildlife refuges, it wasn’t feasible anymore to “keep maintaining these old buildings”, and that it was a “nationwide initiative”. I don’t want to even try to imagine how many beautiful old buildings were destroyed in the name of budget cuts.

I’m going to have to work hard to prevent another pandemic related artist’s block, as I work through the sadness of losing my inspiration. One of my early New Year’s resolutions will be to find a new inspiration, one that can’t be bulldozed out of existence.

I blame it all on 2020. This terrible, horrible, no good, very bad year. Come on, 2021—surely you can’t be any worse. Please.