Everything’s Fine

We were already headed nowhere good before the pandemic, with 1 in 3 teens saying they were feeling sad or hopeless. And then COVID hit. Today, the safety measures for the virus have disappeared, but the effects of years of remote learning and social distancing are still playing out for children of all ages.

That’s where Gwenn Seemel’s series of surreal paintings comes in. The collection is called Everything’s Fine, because Seemel wants to make it clear that they know everything’s not. With the ever-scarier threats of global warming as well as the daily trauma of systemic racism, misogyny, and gun violence, the artist doesn’t want anyone to think they’re the only one struggling with anxiety or depression.

These images are a starting place. “I feel like this,” you might say, using a postcard of a dragonfly being offered an oxygen mask as a private reminder that at least one other person, AKA the artist, has felt like you. Or maybe you make it public, setting the image of a skeleton made of a tangle of measuring tape as your profile pic.

However you use it, the artist wants this work to feel like it belongs to you as much it does to them. That’s true of all their work to some degree, since Seemel places all their images directly in the public domain, free for use by anybody for any reason, without asking permission first–but it’s especially true of this project. As Seemel says, “these images were designed with you in mind, because I need to feel like I’m not alone and because I want you to feel that connection as well.”

To further that connection, the artist has transformed the Everything’s Fine paintings into a free high school art lesson plan as well as a mental health workbook, with the help of the Puffin Foundation and the 78 people who generously supported the project on Kickstarter.