O.Yemi Tubi
UK

www.o-yemi-tubi.pixels.com

The strife and battle with coronavirus will soon be over. This painting titled “It is Finished; the Stone is Rolled Away” is an optimistic prediction that the stone of the coronavirus will be rolled away. The social life of the human race will be resurrected, and it will come to life again.
Just as Lord Jesus resurrected into a new life, the human race will be resurrected from the tomb of coronavirus into a new ‘better normal’. Before lockdown, the human race is heading toward environmental disaster. Some politicians’ denial of the effect of human activities on climate change. Since the lockdown, there are few vehicles on the roads; there are few planes in the air and there has been drastic reduction in air pollution. In our new ‘better normal’, we will take better care of our climate.
The couple in the painting came out of the coronavirus tomb, threw away face masks and embraced in passionate hugs. Prior to the lockdown, some people trade well-being for consumption. They spent more hours at work, away from home and family to earn more money to spend on their wants not necessarily on what they need. Coronavirus’ lockdown influenced the experimentation of working from home. As ‘working from home’ becomes part of our new ‘better normal’ post lockdown, there will be less time at work, more time at home, better relationship with family, less traffic on our roads and cleaner air. The embracing couple in this painting is predicting improvement in human’s relationship in the life after coronavirus. We are going to have new zest for life when we remember those that were not fortunate to survive the pandemic.

We loved the unbridled sense of hope, love and light in this work about rebirth and new beginnings. For us, the foregrounded kneeling Roman soldier could also be seen as a historical comment on the inevitable fall of empire, or of the collapse of environmentally or socially unsustainable civilisations, giving birth to something new. We live in a moment of high existential anxiety, the pandemic coming against a backdrop of rising awareness of climate breakdown, tipping points in the Earth’s natural systems. There is a profound need for meaningful hope, to help shift dystopian collective beliefs about the future unfolding. The spiritual and psychological energy required of us all to achieve rapid sustainable transformations of our societies, values, and modes of resource use, should not be underestimated, and requires nourishment.