It was going to be Eric Freeman's year with a scheduled exhibit at the Batesville Area Arts Council Gallery featuring his large-scale paintings, a strong affiliation with the Arts and Science Center and his "Pine Bluff is Sexy" T-shirts taking off.
The year "2020 started off pretty great," said Freeman, who lives in Little Rock.
The Huffington Post said his Dream Animal paintings allowed "Freeman's birds and beasts [to] roam free in bright colors that only appear in electrified dreams."
Freeman described his art process as the "painting the poetry of dreams."
He's shown his work in New York City; Miami; Santa Fe, N.M.; The Museum of Contemporary Art at Taipei, Taiwan; and throughout his home state of Arkansas.
His work is now part of the permanent collections of the Arkansas Art Center in Little Rock and the Arts and Science Center for Southeast Arkansas in Pine Bluff.
His bench, which has the word "Love" painted in hot orange letters, is a popular spot on South Main Street in downtown Little Rock with newly weds, the recently engaged and others posing for photos there.
Then came covid-19.
"It's been completely intense and unparalleled, and I was living in New York when the Trade Towers were blown up 9-11," Freeman said about the terrorist attack in 2001.
About 2,977 died that day, while so far covid-19 has taken more than 263,000 lives in America.
"It permeated my work. ... I couldn't paint the way I had" Freeman said.
When navigating unknown waters, some embrace their past and perhaps the lessons and skills learned there.
Freeman's Dream Animals were left behind, and he pulled some old, big block letters from a giant plastic container and played around with phases from his poetry and old journals.
"I didn't know what to do with myself, but I began making up T-shirts using block letters [to sell on his website]," he said.
These were "punky, quick" and similar to the ones he had made as a teenager. This style is used in his larger prints.
"Both shirts and prints arose contemporaneously: Both are ways to activate the poetry and make it visible, seeable, wearable, viewable," Freeman said. "They are poetic headlines, painted poems. As visual pieces, they are more public, free from the constraints of a book format."
He wrote on his website about his recent black and white painting made from old wooden letterpress printing blocks saved from The Pine Bluff Commercial's print room.
"The vintage paper, which was used for precomputerized, done-by-hand paste-up, is also from The Commercial," he wrote.
Again, Freeman returned to his past.
The Pine Bluff Commercial was founded in 1881 by his great-great grandfather, and his family ran it for 105 years. His father, Edmond Freeman, was publisher.
In fact, Pine Bluff was Freeman's first home and his family-owned Pine Bluff Commercial was his first job. He worked as a newspaper boy, reporter and paste-up artist.
After high school graduation in 1984, Freeman attended Oberlin College in Oberlin, Ohio, and graduated with an English degree.
Freeman played guitar, sang and wrote poetry, and he performed as Eric America and put out several CDs.
He often collaborated with musician Tav Falco of the Panther Burns.
Then, about the turn of the century, he turned to art.
Like others, Freeman is working his way through the circumstances of the pandemic, and he believes it will have a profound impact on every generation going forward.
There will be a line of demarcation that will be clear to people going forward and to people looking back at this era.
"It will be a real mark in time," Freeman said. "I'm still struggling, but it takes some time to work through this, but hopefully we will create things true to the time."