Amy O’Neill takes her job as an artist seriously. In her studio, there are lots of little rules or constraints and, within them, no rules at all. For a while, Amy was painting inch-tall animals onto tiny, square canvases. Over and over and over. There was something so pleasurable about her petite bears and bison, with their wee shadows, swallowed up in the space of an already small painting. These showed up in our social media feeds like a gift. Later, Amy picked up a rectangular-shaped canvas and everything changed. She began elongating her creatures, a bit unnaturally, surreally. To make them fit, you know. Imagine superlong llamas or cow udders that just go on for a while. When we sat down to talk to Amy, who is an art teacher at Highland Community School, a singer with the 5 Card Studs and a well-known Milwaukee muralist, we asked her about citizenship and democracy and, also, what’s up with all of those stretched-out animals. She didn’t quite have an answer, but it had something to do with adapting, something she feels she’s been doing a lot of herself since the election of Donald Trump. For Amy, being in the studio and making space for artistic possibility is an act of resistance, against the news cycle, the surging pace of the internet and the coarseness of the political moment. In recent weeks, as Milwaukeeans shutter themselves up at home during the Covid-19 pandemic, Amy has been creating online art lessons for all of us. The first one involved moving a lot of furniture around in her living room and piling up a bunch of chairs into something sculptural and interesting to draw.