Staying Positive in a Covid Lockdown

from Artists Down Under - Australia and New Zealand - October 2021

Featured Artist - MIKE KANE

Australia and New Zealand

STAYING POSITIVE IN A COVID LOCKDOWN

By Ilona Abou-Zolof and Christina Brunton

Like many of you, we have been dealing with COVID lockdowns, where we did not see our families for a long time. The only way of catching up with grandchildren was over the phone or video links. Our Artist Down Under group saw our Queensland gathering stopped because of COVID and that in turn lead to our wonderful ADU Zoom meetings. Our monthly zoom meetings included many tutorials provided by our members.

For some of us COVID had turned us negative where we have gone down the rabbit hole to depths of despair, but we choose to thrive by going down the rabbit hole to fantasy land where we use our extra time in lockdown concentrating on our art.

Ilona Abou-Zolof - Seahorses Ilona Abou-Zolof - Cute Turtle

Many of you who know us, will know that before lockdown we used to meet every week and have a tutorial day. During lockdown, we couldn’t get together at all as we both lived in two different hot spots. But we still watched lots of tutorials, only now we just did that on our own. We learnt lots of new things from the tutorials. We spent heaps of time on creating art, doing many things we hadn’t done before.

For Christina it was: - Abstracts, different filter effects, dreamy flowers, steampunk, etc.

For Ilona it was: - Digital painting in Photoshop or Corel Painter, digital art on the iPad with Procreate, etc.

Christina Brunton - Shell Abstract

Christina Brunton - Round And Round

During this past year we were having an exhibition each month and although some of these exhibitions were postponed because of COVID, we still needed to create our art, print, and frame it just in case the lockdown was lifted, and the exhibitions went ahead. We have just heard that the October Head On Festival and national exhibitions which were postponed are now due to open in November. Ironically, we now have three exhibitions in November. The Head On exhibition will be at the TAP Gallery in Surry Hills, another in the Corner Gallery in Stanmore and one in a furniture store in Petersham. As you see we had to keep busy, sane and positive - just positive with our minds not COVID positive.