Pandemic Drawings

Toni Lane’s Pandemic Drawings (2020) are compelling and immediate visual responses to the human consequences of the COVID-19 pandemic. As an artist, activist, and humanitarian, the American artist channels her longstanding commitment to social justice through pastel, ink, and colored pencil drawings. The drawing Seniors First, for instance, stems from Lane’s encounter with an elderly woman in a grocery store during early lockdown. The image of a gray-haired figure clasping her hands amid empty shelves captures both the solitude and precarity of the aging population in a pandemic, while visualizing the quiet anxiety of social isolation and scarcity.

Real Warriors takes on a more celebratory tone, portraying healthcare workers adorned with halos and crowns, a visual metaphor for their heroism. These motifs elevate essential workers’ sacrifice in the COVID-19 pandemic and bring them into the public discourse. Lane’s aesthetic is accessible and emotionally potent. Her cartoon-like stylization, use of vibrant color, and compositional clarity invite immediate emotional engagement. Using a variety of media, like chalk pastel, color pencil, and sumi ink, she directly and succinctly captures various pandemic-related themes like aging, labor, and collective trauma. The self-portrait What I Do All Day offers another layer of autobiographical meaning, positioning the artist in her studio. The drawing pictures the artist from behind, seated in front of a tabletop easel and surrounded by her art, personally including herself in the pandemic reality. There is a social realism (drawing attention to the real socio-political conditions, creating art not for escape but for reflection and recognition) dimension in Lane’s works, expressing a shared global experience of vulnerability, survival, and human connection in a time of unprecedented disruption.