Art during the time of pandemic

How is everyone doing?

What a giant unwitting rollercoaster ride 2020 has been so far, eh?!
Here’s a photo that sums up the past 5 months for me:

In 2019, me wearing a colourful face mask would’ve meant one thing only – I was hopping on a plane to Singapore, London or New York City and protecting myself from your average long haul germs that make jetlag arrivals really tough. Worlds apart from this year’s masked reality.

I just sat down and realised I had entirely dreamed up an update I sent out, in my dream, around March, when I had just finished a mural and artwork for an Amanda Palmer record, when us folks downunder thought the worst bushfire season in living memory was as bad as it was going to get in 2020. I just checked my records and realised I never even sat down to begin writing that update – it was a total figment of my locked-down imagination. So I am now going to go back and tell you everything that has happened since I last wrote to y’all way back in… **AHEM** November 2019.

I rounded up last year with a new series of shoe illustrations. I’ve been doing these for years – they always end up being popular prints and I love that I am occasionally tagged in posts from schools and colleges around the world whose students are creating “Sarah Beetson inspired shoe art”. The most fun of these was the cowboy boots which drew inspiration from @cowgirlsofcolor and the Lil Nas X mega hit “Old Town Road”.

You can shop shoe prints via Etsy here.

Then Christmas came and Chad and I converted a bunch of my line drawings into colour-by-numbers and activity sheets for our 7 nephews and nieces. I am all for handmade presents and this one was pretty popular, not to mention the colour by numbers sheets served as great things to send out to my home-schooling parent friends locked down around the globe in the months that followed.

If you are back in lockdown/home schooling or your kids need some school holiday entertainment – you can download a FREE home printer-friendly PDF colour by numbers sheet for them here. (Fun for adults too!)

In January, I was commissioned by Gold Coast City Council to create a local mural next to a playground at Galleon Park, Currumbin. The mural was sponsored by Bravehearts Child Protection, and the brief was to be centred around their mission statement to Protect, Empower and Educate kids.

The brief gave me the chance to work with shoes again – and the design features adults from all walks of life helping kids. I enlisted the help of my sister and brother in law and their 3 kids aged 4-8 as foot models, and Chad and I spent 15 long days under the hot sun executing the paint. Here’s our work in progress:

When it was finally complete, my nephew and nieces came down to pose with their feet likenesses, and I did TV and radio interviews for Channel 9, 7 News and ABC!

Of course, going on all around Australia in the late summer were the devastating bushfires. Feeling powerless to help, I offered prints by donation to some of the fire services and animal rescue shelters around the country, but I was delighted when I got to take part in an incredible fund raising art project with my friend Amanda Palmer.

Amanda released a charity EP featuring a powerful cover of Midnight Oil’s ‘Beds are Burning’ with Missy Higgins, a haunting new song “Suck it up, Buttercup” and several other collaborations with musicians including Clare Bowditch, Montaigne, Fred Leone, Brain Viglione and Jherek Bischoff. All proceeds went to bushfire fundraising efforts.

Creating the drawings for the artwork was a sombre, cathartic experience:

The resulting artwork I created was used on the EP cover as well as various posters:

During the making of the artwork, Amanda’s tour brought her to Brisbane and she and her team stayed with us on the farm. We had the best time, writing songs with the nieces and nephew, eating all the farm fruits, hunting for glow worms and climbing through waterfalls, and it seems all the more idyllic now in hindsight, since the global pandemic hit just weeks later and we all had to lockdown and keep 1.5m away from each other.

And so, then the pandemic hit. Not so much in Australia initially – my first concerns in March and April were for my friends in Europe and the US. One friend, in her early 40s, ended up in ICU and took a long time to recover. Several friends in London got sick, then got better. Australian friends lost their mum/gran back in the UK, with no way to fly over and no funeral permitted to attend. In 10 minutes of scrolling, 3 of my New York friends lost a grandparent on the same day; one friend in Brooklyn lost 7 close friends and family early on. Jimmy Webb, of legendary NYC punk institutions Trash and Vaudeville and I NEED MORE, died. He was so kind to me last summer in NYC. I mourned him over a cup of coffee in the mug he gave me, wearing the pink Divine “I’m so beautiful” socks I got from him.

Amidst clusters of family zoom calls, houseparty and online quiz nights with friends, and videolink yoga, I started a lockdown art series. It began as a distraction from the fear every time we left the house for the shops, and the overwhelming collective grief. Weeks before lockdown, I photographed my nephew Wynton, 9 and his sisters Etta, 6 and Millys, 4. I allowed each of them free reign of my wardrobe and costume collection, and we styled 3 looks together per kid, a-la Auntie Sarah. Uncle Chad took some knockout photographs for my reference and mum Amy art directed. This photoshoot happened literally a fortnight before lockdown and social distancing would have prevented it altogether, and I am so thankful I jumped on this idea as quickly as I did. Here are some of the photographs:

With so many beautiful shots to work with, it took a while for me to narrow down the reference selections. I also decided to experiment with a new technique, using acrylic inks on cotton rag to create some lush atmospheric backgrounds:

I ended up deciding on a small, medium and large painting for each kid, making a series total of 9 artworks. Of course, as the series evolved, so did the pandemic, and themes from global events began to infiltrate the artworks. Badges on shirts and slogans on hats changed to give thanks to the NHS, to warn of social distancing, the need for washing and sanitizing our hands and wearing masks, and of course, the Black Lives Matter protests became an imperitive focus. The following are the 9 completed artworks.