“Covid 19” by artist Markus Vater
We are offering a limited run of 500 prints which will be signed by the artist.
“Covid 19” by artist Markus Vater
These will be offered in two separate sizes:
30 x 40cm - £130.00
40 x 50cm - £150.00
The prices excl of postage and packing and will be unframed.
We will be donating the original painting to St Georges Hospital and the monies generated from the prints will be used to support our NHS heroes and other local volunteer-based charities and charitable groups.
“Covid 19” by artist Markus Vater
And the home cooks who have baked 100,000 treats for nurses
An acclaimed artist’s dramatic depiction of “the stormy” life of a coronavirus ward is to be presented to the intensive care unit at St George’s Hospital in Tooting, southwest London.
Artist Markus Vater was inspired by the photographs and experiences of Anthea Allen, a senior sister on Critical Care at St George’s.
Anthea has written an email blog, a diary of the unfolding crisis in the coronavirus wards. Although originally intended as an update for family and close friends, Anthea’s emails quickly attracted a far wider audience of readers that included Sir Richard Branson and TV presenters Susanna Reid and Sarah Beeny.
Anthea says, “The colours of Markus’s painting are the ones that bring back all the memories. They are the colours of the wards, and the ones that I see every night when I close my eyes. This painting will give future generations of nurses and other medical professionals an insight into what their colleagues had to endure.”
The painting, entitled Covid 19, will hang in Streatham and Clapham High School, in south-west London, before being presented to the hospital when the pandemic is over. There is a limited run of 500 signed prints of the painting, with proceeds raising funds for nurses.
Vater was commissioned by The Empire Heroes Fund, which was launched during the first lockdown in spring last year to help nurses. The fund was set up by Giles Sequeira and his 14-year-old daughter Maddy, along with neighbour and business partner Vicky Basini.
What began as a plea from the fund for local would-be bakers to make tasty treats for nurses became a slick enterprise – they recruited 300 volunteer home cooks to feed the frontline workers.
In a year, the fund’s volunteer bakers have made and delivered 100,000 sweet and savoury treats to the medical teams at St George’s, Guys and Kingston hospitals. At the peak of the pandemic, the team were delivering over 10,000 edible delights every week.
They were helped by two of London’s finest chefs – Mario Perera, executive chef at The Dorchester, and Jean-Philippe Blondet, Executive Chef de Cuisine at Alain Ducasse at The Dorchester. The chefs were brought on board by former client and Earlsfield resident Isabelle Augier, who will join the team as a trustee.
Giles Sequeira says: “We’ve given 200 Christmas, Easter and Valentines gift bags for each of the nurses on the Covid wards. There were cupcakes and cream teas for International Nurses Day, and portable radios for the wards. We’ve even supplied 15 coffee plungers and a coffee machine for the Italian nurses who were missing their real coffee.”
The fund-raising team was also instrumental in setting up a local initiative, Earlsfield Together, with street co-ordinators on every road in Earlsfield. This enabled them to connect to neighbours via street Whatsapp groups, keeping residents abreast of hospital news and asking for support.
The fund’s morale-boosting ventures included the Heroes Opera Truck on VE Day. From the back of a pick-up truck, opera singer Arwel Morgan sang the best of Vera Lynn beneath the windows of the coronavirus critical care unit at St George’s.
To commission the painting, they reached out to friend and art specialist Greg Rook who, as a father, has also spent many hours in St. George’s. Greg Rook Advisory specialises in connecting credible contemporary artists with collectors and patrons, and Markus Vater, a superb artist and local resident, was contacted as the obvious first choice.
Markus Vater says: “Last March it became apparent that coronavirus would affect a large number of people and from the outside it felt like a storm ravaging through the lungs of people. A storm split into millions of breaths. A storm in which many drowned. When it came to creating a painting about the situation, the image of the storm kept returning to me.
“I made some sketches of a storm and nurses and doctors rescuing patients from the waves. I spoke to Anthea, who compared the experience with being in a war. Paintings of depictions of war felt the right images to her. She described the colours she saw daily: an atmosphere of yellow, beige and blue. The situation was and is relentless and exhausting. Patients die and new patients come. There is no time.”
He adds: “I set out to paint a scene that would remind the nurses in years to come of their experience. A crowded fragmented scene of an ICU room with patients, nurses and doctors, like a sinking ship taking water, but everyone keeps working.”
Streatham and Clapham High School has particular significance to the team. Anthea’s daughter Claudia is a former student and volunteered alongside her mother at St George’s during the first lockdown. Giles and Vicky’s daughters are students at the school and many of the pupils have helped bake the weekly hospital treats.
Anthea says: “Empire Heroes Fund plan to donate this incredible art work to Critical Care at St George’s Hospital. This community team have been phenomenal in their support of me and my team on Critical Care, providing meals, superb cakes, biscuits and the most exquisite doughnuts. Working through the pandemic has been tough and this unfailing support has been incredible and made such a huge difference.”
The fund has applied to the Charities Commission for charitable status to continue to support the frontline NHS heroes and other local charities to include domestic violence and other refuges, the homeless, children’s charities, Wandsworth Prison and others.
For further information contact:
E: giles@empireheroesfund.org
www.empireheroesfund.org
www.gregrookadvisory.com
Markus Vater – Brief biography
Born in 1970 in Düsseldorf, Germany, Markus studied at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf and at the Royal College of Art in London. His work includes drawing, painting, photography, animation, video, sculpture and performance. He has taken part in numerous national and international exhibitions, including the Royal Academy in London. Between 1995 and 2003 he was part of the art collective hobbypopMuseum. His works are held in numerous public collections and he received the Villa Romana Scholarship of Florence. He has also been a tutor at the Royal College of Art, and he lives and works in London.