Calling All Pandemic Painters

CALLING ALL PANDEMIC PAINTERS

Love, beauty, pain and death are powerful themes in art. Poetry, song lyrics, paintings, sculpture, books, theatre, film, street art, etc, all capture the art of emotion through the eyes of the creator.

Some of the worst times, of struggle and hardship, dial it up a bit and often produce the greatest works of art. Personal tragedies, illness, loss, wars, and yes, global pandemics. Artists and creators have been inspired, moved and driven to express their feelings and ultimately help us all to try and make some sense of what we are experiencing.

Sumanley Xulx , Untitled, 2020

From the Middle Ages to modern day, and long before and long after, plagues and pandemics have bore witness to those bearing witness. Historical works came out of tragic times like The Black Death and The Spanish Flu through to modern day works depicting AIDS, Ebola and now COVID!

Pieter Bruegel the Elder, Triumph of Death, c 1562, Museo Del Prado, Madrid

Pieter Bruegel the Elder, a Flemish Renaissance master and Medieval White Walker Whisperer, channeled his zombie apocalypse fears in his 16th century painting, Triumph of Death, a very Game of Thrones depiction of The Black Death, complete with an army of pissed off skeletons.

Edvard Munch, Self-Portrait After Spanish Influenza, 1919, Oslo, at the National Gallery

Edvard Munch caught the Spanish Flu and painted a series chronicling his illness. Munch survived unlike other famous artists including Gustav Klimt who died in 1918 after contracting the Spanish Flu while hospitalised for a severe stroke that left him partially paralysed.

Banksy, Game Changer, 2020

Painters all over the world have been busy creating everything from murals to street art, to self portraits and beyond. Beautiful, bizarre, devastating and angry. 

Has Covid informed your work? Or the work of someone you know? Share with us in the comments below!

Crisis As A Muse: 8 Steps for Immunising Your Mind, Work Practise and Work Space, in Trying Times

 Crisis As A Muse:
8 Steps for Immunising Your Mind, Work Practise and Work Space, in Trying Times

Fires, flood, drought and now COVID-19!
It’s been a challenging time for all of us and it looks like there is a long road ahead.
Now is the time to use what’s happening as fuel to refresh!

 Social Distancing and hand gel are now the new norm,
but that doesn’t have to mean fear.
Let’s flip it around and see it as an opportunity! This time of uncertainty can be also be a time to pivot by taking a fresh look at your outlook, your creative practice or small business, and your work space.
Throw open the windows and take a good look at everything.
Many entrepreneurs, artists, musicians and writers have produced beautiful, extraordinary,
provocative and shocking works with crisis as their muse.

Here are some ideas for cleaning up your craft, refreshing your workspace, and
making the head space to work during the current state of the world:

1.  CLEAR THE CLUTTER

I don’t know about you, but this image makes me feel rather uneasy.

If your head is so jam packed with the crazy crisis, everyday crap and cracking ideas that you can’t fit one coherent thought in there, then here’s a great tip: Write. Them. Down. Yep, that’s it! Get your laptop out, put a note on your phone, or go old school and use a PEN AND PAPER!  It’s always good to get them out of your head and in a place where you can have a really good look at them.

If your office/studio/desk space is so jam packed with the crazy crisis, everyday crap and cracking ideas that you can’t fit your laptop down somewhere: Clean. Your. Shit Up. Yep, that’s it! Get your bin out and put that paperwork you don’t need in it, get a bag out for shit you don’t need to donate, rearrange your crap to be more space efficient!  It’s so fuckin good to get rid of that clutter to get your head in a place where you can look at your work space and not have a fucking anxiety attack.

It’s time to. Get. Your. Shit. Together.

2.  CLEANSE, RINSE, REPEAT

 Make a concerted effort to shift the energy in your work space and your brain space. There are literally a million ways that you can do this: get some flowers or plants to brighten it up, put a fresh coat of paint on the walls, get a new comfy chair, burn sage, hire a witch doctor, invite some friends over for a bottle of wine, cup of tea, shot of Todka (it’s a thing, toffee+vodka = what could go wrong?)

3.  ELBOW GREASE IT

This image. Lol!

Did you have a nice set of projects, all sparkly and shiny, at the beginning of the year and then some how they got tucked shoved to the back of the cupboard getting dull and tarnished? Rescue them! Reach way back in to that dark place and pull them out in to the light. Give them a rub and a good long look. Air them out! Maybe they can be salvaged or maybe it’s time to let them go.

4. WASH YOUR WINDOWS

How are you viewing your practise? What do you see when you look out your ‘window’? Are you seeing things clearly? Is it time to wipe away the grime and smudges and see if you can get a new perspective? Mmmm… New perspectives. Delicious.

5.  RECHARGE YOUR MOJO BATTERIES

For me recharging is with the biggest bad ass bitch of all time. Mumma Nature. But you do your thing, whatever brings your joojoo back!

Dial it back a bit - stare into space, go for walks, sit on the beach, organise the sock drawer, alphabetise the condiments, chill, Netflix, Netflix and chill… creating takes energy and TIME. Ideas don’t grow on trees, or is that money? Either way, take your brain off the boil, reduce the heat and simmer. Simmer time and the livin’ is easy…

6.  THROW AWAY OLD, OUTDATED ATTITUDES ABOUT YOUR SELF-WORTH

Destination, town of FeelGood. Im pretty sure Gorillaz live there. Good place to be.

Okay, this one is big. Like, BIG! We all do it, so let’s shut that shit down! Create a new daily habit of meditating or gratitude journaling. Be thankful for anything big or small - the sunrise, the wind in the trees, that good friend, your smashed almond macchiato on gluten free toast. Looking at the world with gratitude will help you to recognise all the good in yourself and your work.

7.  DUST OFF THE COBWEBS

Does it seem like you are on auto pilot. Same thing. Different day. Well, it’s a great big world out there filled with interesting people. Find a mentor, collaborate with someone, or start hanging out with a supportive network of cool people (uh hellloooo Nauti Studios!)

Do you have other ideas for refreshing? Hit us up with any ideas you have!

Apartheid, Led Zeppelin, Earthquakes, and Moby Dick: Creations Birthed from Crisis

Apartheid, Led Zeppelin, Earthquakes,
and Moby Dick:

Creations Birthed from Crisis

Times of crisis are a huge challenge to all of us. Often breeding personal disaster on top of external disaster.
It is in these hard times that we must let our experiences be the birthing place for new creations. Some of the greatest works have stemmed from times of crisis.
Here are some great pieces of music, film, literature and art that have been created, inspired by crises.

‘When the Levee Breaks’ by Led Zeppelin

Memphis Minnie (left) one of the original writers/performers of
‘When the Levee Breaks’, later covered by Led Zeppelin (right).

‘When the Levee Breaks’ was originally written and sang by Memphis Minnie and Kansas Joe McCoy in 1929. The song was written about the Great Mississippi Flood of 1927, the most destructive river flood in the history of the United States. The disaster destroyed around 130,000 homes and farms, displacing over 700,000 people.

Residents of the area built sandbag walls along the river to stop the flood—known as levees— and some were forced to take shelter on top of them, however, the worsening conditions prompted them to lament about their unstable future, which is where the tune draws its interpretation from. Those who endured the worst were African Americans in the community, who were often forced at gunpoint to build the levees by the white people who operated the refugee camps while suffering systematic poor treatment from the Red Cross. As a result, the lyrics of this song express the horrendous experiences of the oppressed during disaster.

Writing credit to Grassroots Journal.

Moby Dick by Herman Melville

In July of 1852 Herman Melville took a steamer to Nantucket for their first visit to the Massachusetts island, home port of their novel’s mythic protagonist, Captain Ahab, and their ship, the Pequod.

On their last day on Nantucket, Melville met the broken-down 60-year-old who had captained the Essex, the ship that had been attacked and sunk by a sperm whale in an 1820 incident. This person became the inspiration behind Melville’s novel.

Captain George Pollard Jr. was just 29 years old when the Essex went down. They survived and returned to Nantucket to captain a second whaling ship, Two Brothers. But when that ship wrecked on a coral reef two years later, the captain was marked as unlucky at sea and no owner would trust a ship to him again.

Pollard lived out his remaining years on land, isolated and ostracised, as the village night watchman.

Writing credit to Gilbert King.

Neil Blomkamp’s film ‘District 9’

District 9 is a 2009 science fiction action film inspired by events in Cape Town’s District Six, during the apartheid era. 

The film is partially presented in a found footage format by featuring fictional interviews, news footage, and video from surveillance cameras. The story explores themes of humanity, xenophobia and social segregation.

Beginning in an alternative 1982, an alien spaceship appears over Johannesburg, South Africa, and a population of sick and malnourished insectoid aliens are found aboard the ship. The South African government confines them to an internment camp called District 9. Years later, during the government's relocation of the aliens to another camp, one of the confined aliens named Christopher Johnson tries to escape with his son and return home, crossing paths with a bureaucrat named Wikus van der Merwe.

The treatment of the insectoids, and protagonists, throughout the film brings to life the cruelty of xenophobia and social segregation from a first hand perspective. Exploring the effects, from the ground, on real people in mass crisis events. 

Writing credit to Wiki.

‘Remembering’ by Ai Weiwei

In 2009, the dissident artist Ai Weiwei created work to honour the thousands of children who died in the Sichuan earthquake. 

More than 80,000 lives disappeared, many of the dead were young people at school and university. 

The Chinese government censored and controlled all of the information about the earthquake, so people didn’t know the details of what really happened. So Weiwei decided to cover the Haus der Kunst museum’s facade with one sentence from a victim’s mother. She had written to me: “All I want is to let the world remember she had been living happily for seven years.” This beautiful little girl was just the same as any other: she liked to dance, to sing. But suddenly – because of the negligence of the government, the corruption in construction – there wasn’t a safe building for her to go to school in.

The project, ‘Remembering’, angered China’s rulers – and changed his career for ever. 

The Haus der Kunst is a historical building. The architects made it especially for Hitler. They all knew he loved art but had never been accepted as an artist. He criticised any work he considered “degenerate” – any abstraction or early examples of surrealism. So to cover that museum’s facade was a very political act, a very dramatic act. It took 9,000 student backpacks to construct that sentence.

Of course, there is a front door to the museum, so people had to pass right through this sentence. They didn’t understand the Chinese writing, so it forced them to find out, to learn, to read about the show. Munich is a city full of art lovers and collectors and it became very popular.

Writing credit to Ai Weiwei.

Share with us

During this crisis, what are you inspired to create?

What great works, created from crises, have influenced you?