Watch people paint

Musicians aren’t the only artists streaming their work right now Painters such as Durango’s Lauren Bell invite digital audiences into their studios [ art]

When COVID-19 lockdowns canceled all public events and closed non-essential businesses, many musicians moved online, sharing their skills and work in live-streaming shows and concerts, and even practice sessions. But they’re not the only artists reaching an audience through the internet. Though fewer in number, you can also find visual artists presenting their craft live in cyberspace.

One such artist is Durango-based painter Lauren Bell.

Each weekend since we’ve all been quarantining-at-home, Bell has been aiming her phone at an easel, turning on Instagram Live, and putting paint to canvas – while narrating what she’s doing and answering questions from the chat.

“I kind of figured that people are getting sick of, like, streaming Netflix,” she said. “When I’m doing this, it makes me feel like I’m less alone.”

Painting for an audience who are watching the process on a screen is not

Composite image of Instagram screenshot and photo courtesy of Lauren Bell » » LEFT: Lauren Bell talks about a painting in progress during an Instagram Live stream on April 11. RIGHT: The completed painting, “Opulence Unwinding.”

without precedent. After all, instructional TV programming goes back further than even Bob Ross. Unlike “The Joy of Painting,” though, Bell’s streams are live and last longer than 30 minutes, typically an hour or two. She’s also not painting landscapes; Bell’s works are vividly colorful Expressionist-style female nudes

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influenced by painters like Egon Schiele. Eat your heart out, happy little trees.

While the purpose of Bell’s live feed – which can be found at @lbellart isn’t to instruct people how to paint, she’s a firm believer that anybody can make art. If anything, having an audience on a regular basis drives her own work.

“I keep being pushed by a few artists in town to keep painting, keep painting, keep painting because I will go through spurts where I’ll feel really inspired and paint, paint, paint, paint, paint — then I’ll just kind of go on a little hiatus. And that’s kind of what I’ve done for a long time,” she said. “This is really nice because it’s forcing me to actually take an entire day to plan for it and to work on a piece and force myself back into my practice.”

The conversation, too, helps Bell engage with the art.

“In school, that was kind of the whole thing: We would have critiques and we would kind of go back and forth and do that type of thing,” she said. “Being out of school, you don’t have that opportunity much unless you’re a part of some sort of collective or have a lot of artist friends, and most of the people I went to school with have moved away.”

Bell said she intends to keep doing the live streams even when the quarantines are lifted, and hopes to display [the art] in some sort of show in the future. You’ll be able to catch her work in person later this year, she said.

If you’re really hungry for live artistic creation, social media pages aren’t the only place to find it on the internet. Alongside all the video game streaming, Twitch has a category for art. Is it mostly people drawing anime/manga characters? Yes. Is the next largest group draw

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beer drinkers weathering the coronavirus epidemic that has shut down many breweries completely and rendered others to-go only. His suggestion was a surprising one, coming from someone always looking into cutting edge developments in the brewing industry: Go back to your favorite flagship beers.

As beer-drinkers browse tap lists and liquor stores looking for the hot, new brew, they’re ignoring the ones that From Page 7

ing furries? Also yes. But if you wade past all of that, you’ll also find some cool creatives.

Nen Chang, for instance, is a Georgia-based concept artist and illustrator who has been streaming her work on Twitch for just over four years. She was actively recruited by Twitch at a comic con, but has stuck with it because it gives her a way to connect with the people who enjoy her art.

“It gives like kind of an extra layer of like personal attention or personal access that is otherwise absent from things that are more traditional and like the social media landscape,” she said.

Chang, whose website describes her work as “neon fantasy pop-erotica with a death wish” (which feels appropriate to us), currently streams her work on Wednesdays, Thursdays, and Saturdays and typically sees somewhere between 90 and 200 people on her channel.

As a professional artist, she finds that building a community around herself offers a degree of stability when weathering hard times.

“If you think of it, the artist is like a clownfish and their community is like an anemone, and in times of crisis, that anemone will protect the clownfish because, over time, the clownfish has fostered that anemone so that it is its home and its protection,” she said.

Chang’s streaming channel can be found at twitch.tv/killernen. The project she’s currently working on with partner Liz Tecca is a web serial called “Body&- Shadow,” which she describes as a post-cyberpunk xianxia epic (so ... like, a Chinese costume drama/soap opera with cyberpunk elements). — Nick Gonzales

made them fall in love with craft beer in the first place – the New Belgium Fat Tires and Bell’s Amber Ales of the world.

“A well-made classic beer fills you with comfort, and that’s what I think people should look for right now too. Sierra Nevada Pale Ale, Allagash White – that’s what I’m going to put into my grocery cart because they’re a sure thing in an uncertain world,” Bernstein said. — Nick Gonzales

Get Outta Town: Take a digital tour of the Uffizi » I mean, you’re not leaving town ... and you’re certainly not traveling to Italy [ art]

With a third of the population of planet Earth on coronavirus lockdown, we’ve begrudgingly accepted that it’s not the best time to take a vacation. With only a few exceptions, we’ve got to stay home for as long as it takes to get COVID-19 under control.

That said, you can pretend to take a tour of a foreign landmark online – and in our opinion, you might as well head somewhere in cyberspace that you definitely don’t want to visit right now in real life: Northern Italy.

Specifically, Florence.

The city’s Uffizi Gallery is one of the art galleries you can tour virtually on Google’s Arts & Culture app. (You might already have the app on your phone – it’s the one that everyone was using to find works of art that look like their selfies back in January 2018.)

The Uffizi section of the app has four online exhibits with photos and info about works of art, 156 images of the art, a Google Street View version of the museum that you can wander around (that’s really easy to get lost in as you tilt your phone to look around), and one of those 3D phone-based VR “virtual tours” in which you can closely examine Sandro Botticelli’s “Birth of Venus” while a voice with a smooth, Italian accent (Simone Rovida) narrates the experience.

Why digitally tour the Uffizi? It’s one of the most important, largest, and most visited museums in Italy, featuring art primarily from the Italian Renaissance. That’s right, it’s got stuff by the namesakes of your three favorite Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Leonardo (da Vinci), Raphael, and Michelangelo. (Donatello’s works can be found elsewhere in Florence, but not here, you fans of turtles who “do machines.”)

The most famous paintings in the gallery are probably those of Botticelli, including “The Birth of Venus” (windswept naked lady on a clamshell or old Adobe Illustrator logo, depending on how much of a nerd you are), “Primavera” (party in an orange grove), and “Adoration of the Magi” (crowd chilling in a decrepit building).

The complex of buildings itself was built for Cosimo I de Medici in 1580 as offices for Florentine Magistrates, but the Medici family used the top floor as a gallery for all the art and artifacts they collected. When Anna Maria Luisa,

Screenshot of Google Arts & Culture » » Google’s Arts & Culture app lets you get right up in Venus’ business – without a museum guard tackling you to the ground. “But officer, I was just trying to kiss her.”

Courtesy of Michelle Maria/Wikimedia Commons » » While a trip to Italy isn’t advisable right now, you can visit Florence’s Uffizi gallery for free on Google’s Arts & Culture app. Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons » » If you don’t recognize Botticelli’s “The Birth of Venus,” we question how much pop culture you’ve consumed in the last 535 years.

the last Medici heiress, gifted the art collections to the city of Florence, which in turn opened the galleries up to the public in 1765, the Uffizi became one of the first modern art museums (though it didn’t officially become a “museum” until 1865).

If you don’t know much about the House of Medici – which financed the invention of opera and the piano, the building of Saint Peter’s Basilica, and the careers of Galileo, Leonardo da Vinci, Machiavelli, and Michelangelo – there’s a semi-fictionalized series about them on Netflix called “Medici.” It stars, among others, Richard Madden and Sean Bean, and though we haven’t watched it yet, we assume it’s like an Italian “Game of Thrones” with fewer dragons and more popes.

When you’re done with your virtual tour of the Uffizi, add to the experience by ordering Italian food or pizza (there are a few places to get either in and around Durango) and watch “A Room with a View” or “Hannibal,” both of which are set at least partly in Florence.

Is this the authentic Florentine experience? Of course not ... but neither was your free, phone-based art museum tour. What did you expect? — Nick Gonzales

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