Art In The Time Of Covid – One Artist’s Thoughts
“North Sea” by Amy Guadagnoli
As we approach week 25 of worldwide sequestration, protecting ourselves against the Coronavirus pandemic, creative souls are using their imaginations in earnest to explore what they wish to say during a puzzling time.
Some ingenious methods have emerged. The ballerina dressed in casual clothes who performs an impromptu street dance in front of a New York City brownstone, or the musicians who convene out of various apartment windows to share a jazz concert with neighbors. Their craft is wrapped up in their identity and it burgeons out of them into a solo act or a flash mob of joy.
But, what of visual artists or photographers? Their gifts are more solitary, more based on inner ruminations, as they enter studios filled with paint, paper, canvas and cameras and try to harness their free flowing ideas. And how to gather those thoughts when the world outside is filled with fear, anguish and uncertainty?
The Booker prize winning author, Arundhati Roy says it this way:
“Historically, pandemics have forced humans to break with the past and imagine their world anew. This one is no different. It is a portal, a gateway between one world and the next. We can choose to walk through it, dragging the carcasses of our prejudice and hatred, our avarice, our data banks and dead ideas, our dead rivers and smoky skies behind us. Or we can walk through lightly, with little luggage, ready to imagine another world. And ready to fight for it.”
“Lightning Trees” by Helga Thomson
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe said, “In the realm of ideas everything depends on enthusiasm… in the real world all rests on perseverance”.
And so, an artist has to pick up the brush, focus the camera and get to work. Some of us sketch the idea first, others just plunge in to the process to get to where we want to go. But one thing is certain, after all this, a change will occur. Our art, and our aesthetic are bound to be new, fresh, and clarified. Color, line and texture will aid us, but our human expression will be distilled into a new reality, reflecting our will to overcome.
“Vortex” by Deborah Schindler
“Rockaway Beach” by Robert Burgess