NHS Thank You: Michael Craig-Martin

NHS Thank You, Michael Craig Martin, 2020

Art Daily reports that Irish/British artist Sir Michael Craig-Martin has designed a poster thanking the National Health Service for their heroic work during the Covid-19 crisis. The poster may be downloaded for free from the BBC:

http://downloads.bbc.co.uk/scotland/arts/NHS%20poster%20MCM%202b.pdf

and colored by users according to their own choice of hues. People may then display the image to show support for the NHS.

Craig-Martin has chosen to highlight the Gerbera flower (also known as the Berberton Daisy, Transvaal Daisy or African Daisy) a popular flower widely associated with happiness, joy, and love.  The artist notes that during the national lockdown, seeing cut flowers in the supermarket is for many people their primary contact with the natural world, and thus the image of flowers is a particularly reassuring tie to normalcy and the great outdoors at the present moment.

Perhaps the image is offered as a kind of antidote to the now familiar shape of the novel coronavirus SARS-CoV-2; rather than  the terrifying cell-binding protein spikes that radiate from the virus, we now have the opportunity to color in the benign, reassuring petals of the daisy, as a gift of love and gratitude to the NHS.  Instead of being attacked by the pathogen, the Health Service is presented to us as reassuringly covered in a lively field of daisys.

Speculatively, might the act of placing the enlivened colored Gerbera in one's window be felt, if only implicitly, to have a mild prophylactic effect-- holding the virus, in effect, at bay?  As David Freedberg notes in his classic monograph, The Power of Images, pictures are very often sensed, consciously or otherwise, as actively doing something, and that would seem to the case with this mass reproduced image.