Portrait Collage on canvas: Struggles with Covid

 

    My piece is about the challenges I am facing in my world right now. One of the challenges I am facing is a global pandemic of Covid-19. With Covid, I am obligated to wear a mask every time I go to a store, especially in my home town of High River, which is now trying to enforce masks being worn in any public space as part of the law. Which is represented by the mask and the coronavirus on the mask. Because of the numbers of covid are increasing, I am now moved from in-person classes to online classes on zoom. With my classes directly online for the year, I am currently staying in my hometown. Another challenge I am facing is my many injuries. In the collage, there is an image of a back, and that image is a representation of my injured back. I just recently found out a few months ago that I have an injured and c - curved spine, torn shoulder blades, and an impinged rotator cuff in my right shoulder, which is represented by the braced shoulder image on the collage. I have been injured with my shoulder and my shoulder blades for about 2 years. All of the injuries I have are from many years of playing softball. With these injuries, I am limited to do everything. I cannot normally sit, draw, write, or even work on my other assignments without pain. Covid has cancelled my softball season, and so has all my injuries. This year is the first year and only year so far that I have not played softball and I have been playing softball for 15 years. The third challenge I am currently facing is my celiac disease, which is represented by the gluten-free symbol in the collage. I have had this disease for my entire life. However, I have only been diagnosed with celiac for 14 years. This year happens to be the worst year for my celiacs disease. I have been getting ill from the disease, and gluten-free food is one of the most expensive and difficult to find. Especially at the beginning of the breakout in March. When covid first began, everybody was stalking up on food, people would even stalk up on gluten-free food, which became very limited for months and even difficult to find. Nowadays, gluten-free food is easier to find and even beginning to progress, however, because of people stalking up on all the food, gluten-free food is now more expensive than it has ever been. 

The artist I was trying to reference was Louie Jover, because of the split head. instead of using many geometric shapes and different images to create the face, I wanted to incorporate my own perspective by using different shapes and images to create a sense of a spine with arms. Those images chosen are to give a visual explanation of what I am currently struggling in my life.