$19.99
5 in stock (can be backordered)
Twenty ink drawings made through lockdown, tracing 2020’s fear and quiet tenderness one page at a time.
Some years leave a mark you can point to on a calendar. 2020 left a mark you had to draw your way through. This art book gathers twenty ink drawings made during lockdown, when the usual rhythms of work, travel and company fell away and a pen and a blank page became one of the only steady things left in the day. There’s no polish here, and no attempt to tidy up what those months actually felt like. Instead, loose, expressive linework carries the fear, the boredom, the small domestic tenderness and the strange, suspended stillness of a world that had stopped moving. Each page reads like a breath taken and let go.
One drawing, titled ‘Sweetness and Light’, sits at the emotional centre of the book. It shows a young elephant and a small child facing each other, close enough to share breath, rendered in loose pen and ink strokes that wobble and thicken the way a hand does when it’s working from feeling rather than reference. There’s no background and no distraction, just two figures meeting in a moment of unguarded tenderness. It’s a small, simple scene, but it carries the quiet hope that ran underneath 2020’s harder headlines: that softness and connection were still possible, even at a distance, even behind a mask, even through a screen.
The book itself is a softcover object, twenty pages of archival-quality paper bound to be handled rather than shelved. A semi-gloss finish gives the paper a slight tactile pull under the fingers, and the ink drawings are laid out to be turned through slowly, page by page, rather than skimmed in one sitting. There’s a deliberate plainness to the production, closer to a kept sketchbook than a polished gallery catalogue, and that plainness is part of the point. This was drawn in real time, in a real lockdown, without the benefit of hindsight.
Read together, the drawings in ‘COVID 2020’ work less like a record of events and more like a diary kept in ink, imperfect, unfiltered, and honest about a year most people would rather forget than relive. For anyone who wants to sit with that year again through a different medium than the news, or who simply loves ink drawing that doesn’t try to hide the hand behind it, this is a quiet, unhurried way back in.
COVID 2020 – A Reflective Art Book Journey
