While many are stuck indoors, the global hashtag #QuarantineArt has become a virtual place where artists can showcase their best work – beautiful collages, knitting, sketches, sculptures and more. 

Dallas-based artist Travis Barnes painted vibrantly-colored seeing eyes on top of spare wood chips and posted his creation on Instagram. Barnes said being cooped up changed his perspective.

“I don’t think I would’ve painted it this way had I not been under quarantine,” he said. “It definitely inspired how I approached it visually.” 

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0800hrs. Quarantine art. Venturing into the red zone today for imperial work credits which can be exchanged for sustenance and decontamination supplies. Wish me well, dear comrades. … #art #painting #scifi #horror #occult #eye #thirdeye #allseeingeye #oddities #electricwizard #artistofinstagram #artistsoninstagram #acrylicpainting #quarantine #quarantineart #fuckcovid19 #covid19

A post shared by Travis Barnes, MFA (@travis_barnes_art) on Mar 16, 2020 at 6:05am PDT

Barnes said seeing all the news about the coronavirus gave him the idea for his paintings on wood.  

“Corona…corona…and I’m thinking about the shape, the circle around the sun and it made me think back to the eye and a different way of doing the iris,” he said. “I was trying to experiment with that and pass the time.” 

Stephanie Worley in Weatherford, Texas used the #QuarantineArt to share her experiments with different mediums like clay, which she used to mold a life-like portrait of a giraffe. 

https://www.instagram.com/p/B9zCH9zHamd/?utm_source=ig_web_copy_link

She also posted a collage made out of recycled Corona beer bottle caps. Worley dug through her garage to find some old wood and made daisy-like flowers out of the folded and painted bottle caps. 

“It wasn’t even until I was posting it that I realized it was ‘corona’ art so it actually made me think of virus art,” she said. 

Across the world, artists from India, Norway, Lithuania, Serbia, Egypt and other countries shared their artwork using the hashtag, which has accumulated more than 1,000 posts on Instagram. 

https://www.instagram.com/p/B95WQrXBql4/