40 nights/40 days (22/40)

40 nights /40 days: From the Lockdown (2020)

At the beginning of the COVID-19 lockdown, I set up a small desk in my bedroom as a makeshift studio. Armed with a set of newly acquired Winsor Newton artist’s-quality watercolours and a stack of Fabriano postcard paper books, I set myself the task of completing one painting a day.

My partner’s father, an archaeologist by profession, had left us with piles of old National Geographic magazines; each one full of their remarkable photographs. Daily, I thus selected an image that resonated to inspire a small watercolour that reflected my internal state. I created 40 postcards which I imagined I could send out to the world to tell them how I am feeling.

The chosen images were mostly of single human beings, dwarfed by the vastness of natural settings; places that evoke the experience of awe. The environments they found themselves in were mostly terrain too severe for human habitation and potentially life-threatening environments.  I was grateful to the brave people in the photographs for bringing spaciousness to the constraint of lockdown. In the end there were also several images that fell outside of this theme, but since they also somehow commented truthfully on my everyday experience, I included these as well.

Shown here are a selection of images from this series; the rest of the images of this series can be seen on my website at https://www.hanienconradie.com/watercolours