Lockdown art: Rediscovering the joy of still life

When we first started staying home in March, I found it really difficult to concentrate. I felt like I couldn’t do anything creative… I just wasn’t in the mood. Which is understandable — most of us have never lived through a pandemic before, right? There’s so much going on, it was all so new and worrying (it’s still worrying, just less new now!) and I’m sure I’m not the only one who felt that their mind was a bit scrambled. I certainly had no words in my head that I could capture to write and even more startling for me, I couldn’t really get carried away in a good book either.

Realising that this situation was going to be with us for quite a while, I decided I needed to try to do something instead of just mooching around getting depressed and scared. I’ve been wanting to get back into my visual art for a while, so I thought a nice gentle way to try this would be the goal of finishing the pages in the half-used sketchbook I had on my desk. The real challenge would be to do this whilst not falling into the trap of requiring constant productivity, because that’s just as unhealthy.

But my brain is all scrambled and stressed and lazy and I can’t think of what to draw!

Enter the still life. If you can’t make something up out of your head, don’t. Even in iso, even just in your own house, there’s so many objects you can use as a subject for drawing. I especially like kitchen items. Tea cups are great, and jugs… wine bottles have cool shapes and labels and coloured glass. Fruit and vegetables are fantastic. Potplants… wow, that’s almost a landscape! You don’t even need a whole lot of different objects. Try drawing the same thing over in different styles and/or using a different medium. Move your lamp around and change up the lighting. Move around the object and draw it from different angles.

The best thing is, your subject won’t get up and walk away from you!