Instead of cleaning a state beach or wandering tide pools on Earth Day’s 50th anniversary last week, San Francisco sea life painter Annie Walker was joined by artists across the globe in HOME, the world’s first stay-at-home environmental mural festival.
“I paint for the love of the ocean and sea life, to spread awareness of its beauty because it’s disappearing before our eyes,” Walker said. “My paintings remind people that there is a whole other world out there completely different than ours.”
The festival was presented by nonprofit organizations including PangeaSeed Foundation, Whanganui Walls and Alternative Arts Initiative in order to “unite creatives around the common cause of giving our HOME planet an artistic voice as we set our sights on a world post-coronavirus,” according to a website by Sea Walls, an ocean art collective.
The site also lists the causes for environmental activism as the loss of biodiversity, the global climate crisis and the collapse of ecosystems.
HOME also featured livestreams, Zoom panel discussions and webinars from artists’ homes from April 21-26. On Instagram, people used #Home2020 to share the festival’s mural posts.
San Jose resident and illustrator Brittni Paul said the campaign prompted a great response on social media and gave people an idea of how much they wanted to share.
“You could totally just do it on your own and not interact with other artists that are involved at all or you can try to attend all of the virtual panels,” she said.
Paul said that letting people watch her livestreams and getting into a conversation about the Earth was more important to her than finishing her mural.
Meanwhile, Marissa McPeak, a San Jose State alumna and Ntropic production artist, said that having the space and time to paint a 10-hour mural by herself, away from technology, was a sacred and meditative experience.
“It’s important in isolation to take care of ourselves,” McPeak said. “My piece is a personification of Earth self-soothing herself, just to go with the idea of COVID.”
McPeak said she is a photographer and an illustrator and that painting is more of her free, low-pressure work instead of her medium.
San Jose resident, designer and muralist Alyssa Wigant also said the pandemic has taken a toll on her creativity but that HOME helped provide inspiration.
“HOME campaign gave us guiding questions to work through and one of them that stood out to me was regarding biodiversity,” Wigant said. “And I was really inspired by the song ‘Oh, What A World’ by Kacey Musgraves.”
Wigant said the song had beautiful imagery about the magic of the Earth and she wanted to capture its biodiversity by including creatures and organisms from land, sea, sky, earth and the solar system.
“Burnout is a huge issue, especially now with everyone being cooped up in quarantine,” Paul said. “What I get from a lot of artists is that they feel like they have to keep performing at the level they were before all this happened.”
However, Paul said she felt that this prompt was a natural transition because a majority of her work is focused on endangered species and she has always considered herself an “activist artist.”
“In my work, I try to talk about the environment,” Paul said. “Earth Day lets me highlight that even more because it gives me the opportunity to talk more openly and candidly about it versus presenting my art to people aesthetically.”
Annie Walker said her piece started as a light and colorful underpainting with the ocean as a background. Then she added layers of colors and details of the coral reef and sea life animals.
“This mural project helped me gain motivation to paint every day and paint a giant coral reef,” Walker said. “I haven’t painted a reef scene in a while and it was exciting to get back into it.”
Sea Walls’ HOME website said that in this time of uncertainty, art and creativity are crucial tools to unite and inspire important messages to the masses.
“We’ve lost friends. We’ve lost family. We’ve lost job security and our daily independence,” the website stated. “What we haven’t lost is our drive to create and the will to communicate our unwavering belief that tomorrow will be a
better day.”
