October was packed with milestones and relishing moments that made the New Normal more bearable. First, I celebrated my 29th birthday. I reconnected with my high school in two ways- I caught up with two of my classmates who also found their ways to New York and gave a presentation on COVID as a guest speaker to my old math teacher’s algebra class. Last but not least, I (early) voted!

Shortly before my birthday, my sister and I took a trip to the Met. This was our first museum visit since lockdown. We had just finished a mandatory quarantine of 14 days after returning from our home state Georgia, one of the restricted states flagged by Governor Cuomo as high COVID transmission areas. I reserved a time slot a week in advance and solely looked forward to this outing to get through the quarantine.

The Met is always a delight. The sheer grandeur of it forces me to reflect and get lost physically and mentally. It’s humanly impossible to cover everything in one day, but being a NYC resident, I could come back and explore the rest at my own pace – the Met is an ongoing personal project for most New Yorkers. This time we checked out the Lattice Detour by Hector Zamora on the Roof Garden and the Jacob Lawrence exhibition. They were both riveting and praiseworthy, but I prefer stumbling upon classics or more traditional pieces such as this painting by Picasso. I mean traditional loosely here. It would be sacriligious to gloss over centuries of art evolution by grouping Velazquez and Picasso into one arbitrary “traditional” category.

Having studied a bit of art history of Spain in high school and college Spanish classes, I struck a chord with this piece from Picasso’s Blue Period. It’s not one of his well-known works but looked familiar to me. I could immediately recognize it by the blue monochrome that resonates with somber, melancholia and depression. All makes sense because Picasso painted such to mourn his friend’s death in his 20’s. Behind the telling colors, I found nuances that juxtapose the blue sentiments. It is a portrait of a poised woman with her head tilted slightly, revealing her left jawline and ear. She is staring at the viewer with suggestive curiosity as if she is about to ask you a question. The orange tone of her skin brings about warmth to counteract the prevailing blue, especially her long navy hair that seems to continue below her shoulders. What I saw in the painting was resilience- the woman keeps her composure in a gloomy ambiance. This subtle contrast makes the artwork powerful.

What do you associate with the color blue? Are you feeling blue? With the COVID epidemic still in progress and the Election Day merely five days away, people around me have expressed that they’ve been anxious, irritable and nihilistic. Are you blue politically? With our country being deeply polarized, it is hard to avoid taking sides or identifying yourself with one particular political group. The current presidential candidates are fighting to turn the Swing States into Blue or Red to win the election. I wonder why the government has to be this black-and-white. What about the gray area or the color purple? We’ve come to the point where we are unable to unite over the issues that should transcend the ideological differences, such as public health that is more crucial than ever during a pandemic. The divisiveness is accentuating my blues today.