East Sussex artist battles low mood with brightly-coloured Covid diary

Christopher said he has had a life-long battle with depression and anxiety: “I fill much of my artwork with bright colours and naive imagery which helps lift my mood during darker times.

“Over the course of the first lockdown I kept myself busy by keeping a visual diary of everything I experienced. I found this gave me a sense of purpose during a particularly worrying period.

“I have taken these 70 images, added my written thoughts and turned them into a book: The Covid Visual Diary (Or What I Did On My Enforced Holidays).

“The images and accompanying text document events from banal to bizarre over a period of time that hopefully won’t be repeated in living memory.

“It’s been a funny old year. Personally, it was already going sideways, what with one thing and another. On a global scale, an event like the coronavirus pandemic of 2020 is something that mercifully happens only once in a lifetime, if that.

“We all take so much in life for granted. We get lost in our own little worlds, our own problems big or small, but sometimes there is an event that is so huge that no one can possibly ignore it.

“Even if you didn’t contract Covid yourself, it will have affected you in some way or another. It may have been directly through losing a family member or job. Or it could have been through some indirect means that you could not possibly have imagined until it happened.

“I have tried to focus on what I felt were the universal truths under the pandemic… that which affected everyone but with my own particular spin on them. But like all plans, that one went awry and some of this became quite personal and I hope you can forgive me when it does. It is a diary after all.”