LOCKDOWN is tough for many but for some the unwelcome isolation has undoubtedly been relieved by musicians, actors, writers and artists.

We’ve been reporting for three months or so on an online output which has worked hard to replicate the vital experience of being in a theatre, at a gig or wandering through an art gallery and it seems right to ask the artists how this time has affected them.

Without their efforts, we’d generally have a duller life and, in the current claustrophobic times, these creative souls, despite often precarious income, have stepped up and spread their talents further and wider and gained new audiences.

Anyone writing or making music, art or drama must be fed up with the media banging on about Shakespeare writing, during plague years, King Lear, Macbeth and Antony and Cleopatra. For some artists, this time is fruitful but, for others, it has deprived them of their stimuli.

Artist Geraldine Mitchell is ruthlessly honest: “When I paint I am in a kind of zen-like mental state. But currently at that level there is layer of white noise of agitation that means I have not put brush to canvas so far.

“I actually had something like a panic attack the week Johnson was defending Cummings and wanting to rush the country back into ‘unlocked.’ Their behaviour makes the whole thing so much more anxiety-provoking!”

Fellow artist Sonia Boue says: “For now, my studio is out of bounds and I can’t work on my most recent cycle of paintings in oils. They were tantalisingly near completion. It was my first time using oils, which proved so immersive that I was transported to my grandmother’s balcony in Barcelona in the Franco era, while painting the ripening tomatoes that were ever-present on her windowsill.

“These tomatoes have become emblematic of my grandmother’s resilience as a survivor of a civil war and subsequent exile.

“My work is about home — and losing home — and it’s rooted in my family history. I associate lockdown with states of limbo such as exile and dislocation, which has given me a creative head start in some ways.”

Musician Ilena Cravitz is using lockdown “to unearth Jewish musical treasures” and share them via live online shows.

They’re usually just her and her violin but she has organised a daily Zoom series that showcased 36 klezmer fiddlers in 12 countries and she’s sharing her love of klezmer love by teaching themed online workshops.

Lifelong songwriter and musician Simon Rivers — of Bitter Springs, Oldfield Youth Club and, alongside Vic Godard, Subway Sect — has had an enforced lockdown of 12 weeks. He usually works as a postman.

“Being off work and not being ill has never really happened before. I felt like a fraud and that I ought to be out there on the front line with my colleagues at Royal Mail.

“It made me rather anxious but, eventually, after much painting and gardening, I began to channel all the guilt, stress and anxiety into my music. That is something I normally do anyway but this being enforced by someone other than myself was weird, to say the least.

“My wife Kim is at able to work from home so we have been together almost every second of the last 12 weeks. It’s a good thing we love each other and also that she’s in my band Oldfield Youth Club so we can work on new songs together.

“At the moment it feels like everything’s changed and there's no going back.”

Some creatives, it seems, cope better with lockdown better than others and, according to psychotherapist Katerina Georgiou, it depends on the kind of isolation they experience.

“Feeling emotionally isolated is different to feeling spatially isolated,” she says. “One can give way to despair, the other to breathing space. With Covid-19 the isolation is enforced, which means you can let go a bit, submit to the restriction, which frees up energy for something else.

“Creativity often emerges through limitation and there is also a connection and togetherness in this particular isolation, which is global.”