Why one artist's new normal includes more focus and empathy

Transcript

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Karina Mitchell: And finally, another installment of our series “The New Normal,” in which we feature your stories about how you’re living now.

Tonight we head to California to meet an artist working in an unusual medium.

NewsHour Weekend’s Christopher Booker has more.

Christopher Booker: The art work of Joanne Bolton is the bi-product of creativity and dog ownership.

Joanne Bolton: I was looking around for something I might like to do when I retire and we had a new dog and I was walking around the neighborhood. I don’t know what time of year it was, seeds and everything were on the ground. I picked him up and thought, what can I do? These. These are free.

Christopher Booker: Free, and in the hands of Bolton, rather fantastic. Owls constructed from flower petals, ballerinas made of leaves, or cats with pine-cone tails.

Joanne Bolton: I have like five or six drawers of these leaves that have been pressed so I can use them over and over again. Several years old.

Christopher Booker: Bolton creates her images on top of a black, velvet sheet, and then takes a photograph. Right now she says she’s not sure what she wants to do with all of the work, but at least during this time, our socially distanced time, she says she is keeping really busy.

Joanne Bolton: My son kept saying, “you can do this, you got all this time.” And I’m saying to him, it’s no different from another day for me. But what is different is that it’s given me more focus. And more empathy and I hope we’re able to stay isolated long enough to make it worthwhile.