Contagious Love Supports PPE Production

Resident Artist, Ella Shepard has recently been involved with an artist campaign for which she has created a series of artworks, inspired by pandemics through history and the idea of living in isolation. The campaign in question, the Artist Support Pledge, aims to bring artists together worldwide, but also encourage creativity in a time when galleries and exhibitions are closed.

The first painting in the series, ‘Contagious Love’, takes inspiration from a Hollywood photograph taken during the 1937 flu epidemic. In a bid to support the face shield operation happening at Leighton Park, Ella is generously donating a proportion of the proceeds from her sold artwork towards the initiative. “Each purchase will provide at least 20 masks for those workers supporting us in a time of global crisis.” commented Ella.

The Resident Artist continued to explain the process behind her series of artworks “Within my artistic practice I’ve been looking into archived photography and historical documentation. It’s fascinating looking at photos from before our time as they feel so distant but familiar at the same time. A lot of people have been considering these Covid-19 times as reminiscent of war times, the unsettling overshadowing of something very ominous with an indefinite end date.

I have never really tied my artwork to societal issues or politics or fixed it so to speak in our specific time, but I feel that this is something that can’t be ignored, this photo felt uncannily real, with such an underlining darkness expressed with a fragility to the situation.”

Aside from her own topical work, Ella has been keeping students creatively occupied with her video tutorial which explains how to transform a photograph into a digital illustration using Photoshop. Reworking Mexican painter, Frida Kahlo into a pop art portrait as her example, Ella has received a range of personal and quirky responses; from celebrities to family members to the Queen.

‘Contagious Love’, which has already reached over 40,000 people on Instagram, along with other originals and prints is available to browse and buy on Ella’s website. You can find more of her artwork on Facebook @EllaShepardArt and Instagram @ellashepardart.