Walking to pick up my granddaughter from school as dinnertime approaches. They start just after breakfast time but have a siesta break for a couple of hours at mid day before returning to studies to coincide with adult work hours. Her mother’s currently immersed in the production of her latest multimedia theatre piece though so I’m on deck. The siesta break may involve a nap but usually means some kind of outdoor games combined with self-schooling, where they get to follow up any interest or passion of their own. My Lily has, like at least half her friends, taken the chance to explore art techniques and subjects, a good start for a career in the arts like mine. Given the importance of theatre, music, visual art, digital storytelling and other media, we have governments dedicated to centralizing arts in school curricula and community administration. I was a painter for almost forty years, lucky enough to surf the wave of reforms after the COVID 19 pandemic. When I was a child, arts education had been suppressed or eliminated as unproductive in education and after I graduated I pretty much starved unromantically for a few years, determined to paint rather than take a meaningless office job. I knew I was an outmoded cliché and did quite a lot of digital work in animation on the side to keep going. When the pandemic hit, we were quarantined in our homes. I could do some work online but a lot of it dried up as the economy crashed. Soon, though, I became part of a world wide community of artists and performers dedicated to, at first, entertaining audiences including those who would have had no affordable access to their work under the capitalist commodity model. People not only attended concerts and virtual museum and gallery tours online, they downloaded books by the thousands and started online reading groups. But it didn’t stop there. They learned to play the instruments that had gathered dust for years and they came out on their balconies to play and sing with their neighbours. They recreated classic paintings with household objects; cleaning fluid bottles became parrots and daughters became the Mona Lisa. They collaborated on video productions and read stories and poetry of their own. They uploaded videos of traditional Indigenous dance. Where we had been told for a generation that art was a frill and a drain on taxpayers, we learned that it was crucial to our survival not only in terms of passing the time but staying sane and retaining our humanity in isolation. Once the pandemic passed, the old narratives of art’s irrelevance crumbled in tandem with a refusal to accept other myths such as that of endless growth and planetary devastation once we left our homes to clean skies, clear rivers and reinvigorated populations of wildlife. Funding flowed into producing artists and audiences, and before long I was making a living as a painter and able to raise a family. I still never got rich but I managed to live authentically and believe in my contribution to society. And now I get to cook dinner for a six year old whose arms are full of bright colours as we walk home and whose head is full of bright ideas.

Inspiration: All the artists and performers who keep working and producing in the face of economic crisis during this pandemic.

Image:  Attribution-NonCommercial 2.0 Generic (CC BY-NC 2.0) - Paul Gillard