Here are a few of the art journal pages I have made in the last few months that are related in some way to my feelings or thoughts about the pandemic. I will include some process photos if I have remembered to take any. The first one is my favourite Covid related page that I’ve made so far. I call it “Stronger Together”…it’s about the importance of friendships and family, how we need to help each other to keep safe,how we’ve been missing getting together in person, how we will love it when we can be together again without fear. I hardly ever do black and white pages but I love how this one turned out. As you can see I used black and white images of the Covid virus seen under a microscope. I enjoyed cutting the chains of people holding hands. The white ones are cut from the sheet music of the song “I Will Survive”

This next page I made at when I was feeling the weight of the world’s increasing dismay and fear at all the deaths from this pandemic. I used an image of a medieval plague doctor wearing the long pointed mask (in which they used to insert herbs and incense they believed would keep away the bad “humours” ) and an image of London during the plague. I also used one of Picasso’s paintings which I tore down the middle separating the woman from the man and child. You can see here the collage pieces before I added paint.

The next page is more light hearted…it refers to the fact that in lockdown many of us don’t even know what day it is anymore. I used an odalisque from a painting by Matisse as my focal image and I painted some tissue paper with the same colours I was using on the background. I decided to cut out the painted tissue paper into shapes which i thought looked vaguely Turkish. Or Moroccan maybe. Anyway, my odalisque is having a nice relaxing time, and indeed at the time I made this page I was enjoying not doing very much…my classes and singing groups were all cancelled and I didn’t have to go anywhere and had a lot more time to read and make art.

Here’s an earlier version of the page, I enjoyed the combination of blue and red.

The last one for this post is from my altered book journal (which is smaller than A4). This page is about the loss of identity that sometimes occurs when we no longer have our roles and occupations. In this page I am missing singing with the Songbirds and ask the question “Who am I if I am not singing?”