The creative juices are flowing freely amid this enforced isolation
Isolation may be boring, but it also seems to foment a creative impulse in some people. For example, my aunt, who lives alone, has spent a number of long evenings performing her favourite songs on the piano, from Count Your Blessings (Reginald Morgan and Edith Temple) to Beyond the Sea (Bobby Darin) and Waterloo Sunset (The Kinks). There is something uniquely moving about watching a piece of music performed beautifully in total isolation. Perhaps one’s sensitivities are heightened and every bit of emotion goes into the playing, since it can’t go into social outlets.
The painting Washing (above) draws on that same feeling of days spent isolated at home. In this case, it is a mother on maternity leave with a lot of washing to do. The artist, Katherine Perrins, was looking after a new baby, hanging up clothes and gazing at her drying rack every day, but her artist’s brain was thinking simultaneously about light and altarpieces. The result is a sublime rendering of the mundane.
Home-schooling likewise seems to be a source of great inspiration. A family I know spent an inordinate amount of time setting up, posing and photographing their own real-life tableau of a painting by Velázquez called Old Woman Cooking
Eggs. Another family in Kent released a lockdown version of Les Misérables’ “One More Day” to acclaim. And a family in California spent days in isolation building a two-storey Rube Goldberg machine – an absurdist domino-style contraption – to the delight of geeks everywhere.
In a similar vein, the BBC Radio 1 DJ Annie Mac has been running a feature throughout the lockdown called “Isolation creations” – tracks created by artists while in isolation. One song in particular, called
Introspective, captures the mood: “You’ve got to smile by yourself, run a mile by yourself,/ Meditate, walk in the countryside by yourself,/ Stand tall by yourself, rise and fall by yourself,/ You were born alone and you will die all by yourself.”
My own lockdown has been mostly taken up with chores and childcare (we are not yet at the Velázquez, or even finger-painting, stage), but I have managed to bake enough cakes to finish an entire bottle of vanilla essence. That has never happened before.
Anton Chekhov knew something about isolation. His characters always seem to find themselves living the life of an unfulfilled intellectual in some godforsaken provincial town, surrounded by knownothings. In Three Sisters, the would-be professor, Andrei, wistfully describes one of the peculiar comforts that only a busy city can offer: “In Moscow, you can sit in a huge restaurant without knowing anyone or being known and still not feel a stranger. Here you know everyone and everyone knows you but you’re a stranger, an utter stranger… and all alone.”
I’m not sure what city living really is with the restaurants and cafés and galleries shut.