Â
Continuing a craft she learned thru her mom, Rosanna, Giamila has been running a serious ‘Knitting Fever’. This last year has been super stressful and  the craft of knitting appears to be of great value in managing anxiety. I bear the fruits of Giamila’s psychologically beneficial handiwork. A scarf, a zip up cardigan, woolen fingerless mittens, a ski cap and a second Wool cardigan sweater.
Â
Â
just sitting at home, reading the day to day graphic charts of pandemic deaths, economic misery, job losses,  and the political tug-of-war over how to manage either the response or the spin of the grim facts, and feeling shut in, cut off, not to mention even if you are holding on to a job the adjustment to the new bureaucratic methodologies and their technical learning curves and snafus is a campaign of emotional attrition. The simple, ‘do something’ zen of making something useful, something beautiful, for a loved one, is a grounding, positive activity with visible benefits to one’s sanity. I then wear this garment of love. A cloak against the feeling of separation or hopelessness.
Late night and wearing the first sweater Giamila knit for me as well as woolen house slippers and cotton skull cap knit for me by her mother Rosanna. Drawn with fountain pens and Faber-Castell Pitt Artist Pens on a Stillman & Birn Gamma Series sketchbook.
Spent hours today cleaning up old hand planes used to prep my woodblocks for printing. Didn’t think once during that time of “day to day graphic charts of pandemic deaths, economic misery, job losses, and the political tug-of-war over how to manage either the response or the spin of the grim facts, and feeling shut in, cut off”
Something you ain’t gonna get with a “smartphone” in your paws. Put ’em down-turn off the tube. Dig in the yard, knit, clean the attic, bake a cake. hand-eye kinda stuff.
Well bully for you Lou. However, and whatever you need to get on with your life big boy. The woman you see knitting in these drawings is an immunologist who actually knows something about the dynamics driving the pandemic and has had to listen to the blatherings of immensely less informed politicians and armchair quarterbacks chock-a-block full of ideologically driven opinions. A person who had already published books and papers on cytokine storms long before reporters were scurrying to figure out what the fuck that meant. A PhD biologist with years of research and university professor currently managing a load of more than 800, as in eight hundred, students. Born in Milan, which was and continues to be one of the most virulent red zones of the pandemic. A zone in which her elderly parents and her brother and his wife still live. It is her life’s mission and her hearts concern to follow and understand these developments, as it is for my cousin, a nurse in a NJ hospital who has had to turn life support off on more people than she’d choose to count as well as her son an intern working in Philly and NYC. All three of them know people and colleagues who’ve gotten ill, one who has been debilitated by COVID 19 for 9 months. And the science deniers and tra-la-las out there who Just can’t understand what the fuss is all about are blithely unaware of how much they depend on people whose job it is to face this head on. She was upset about the developments loooong before this became the topical badminton for the clueless. Knitting IS that thing she does to recharger her batteries and center herself before tending to her job.