When I look back at the origins of my art business, By Kerwin, today – a brand that has now exhibited in London, New York, and Tokyo, and ships work to collectors around the world – it’s almost surreal to remember where it actually began and really got off the ground. Not in a studio, not in a gallery, not in some glamorous creative moment of inspiration. But in the stillness, suffocation, and sheer emotional chaos of 2020. And in my bedroom in particular.
I had actually already gone live with my art business – the online shop went live at the end of November 2019, and I had the first dozen or so paintings, which I’d photographed and made available to purchase as prints, but I didn’t yet have much of a plan for By Kerwin beyond that. Until the unique opportunity and expanse of time that the pandemic presented.
The year the world stopped turned out to be the year my life changed direction.
This post is the story of how COVID, in all its bleakness and unpredictability, became the unlikely catalyst that allowed me to turn a lifelong dream into reality – and why the art I create today is so deeply connected to that moment.
Read on to discover perhaps the most personal and important behind-the-scenes story about my art and business that I’ve rarely discussed before in this detail…
To understand my perspective on the challenges of 2020, you need to understand the contrast.
Just a year earlier – and in fact four months before the doom of March 2020 began – I had been living in Singapore – and it was, without exaggeration, the most transformative year of my adult life to date. I’ve written about that experience in detail, but the short version is this: Singapore was the year a lot of things clicked for me and my professional aspirations as a young adult. I grew, I learned, I expanded my skill set, and I gained a level of confidence and independence I’d never had before.
That year gave me momentum. Real momentum.
After my first experience living abroad and getting valuable sales experience, when I moved back to the UK in November 2019, I returned feeling ready to launch myself into a new chapter.
I also had the skills, the confidence, and the hunger to build something of my own. I’d always had the dream – since I was young – of creating my own business, my own products, my own brand. Painting had always been a natural talent and hobby, but I’d never had the space, know-how or belief to turn it into something bigger.
Singapore changed that. It lit the fuse.
Immediately upon returning to the UK, in November 2019, I learnt how to set up a modest online shop and how to photograph my paintings so they could be turned into prints. I had my first twelve portraits in my collection which I felt was enough to start a shop and brand. But beyond that, and resurrecting the Facebook business page I’d started with my first art business, Kerwin Art Collections Ltd in 2012, I had no idea what to actually do next.
But that was fine – my goal at this stage was simply to steadily learn how to grow this online shop on the side of a new, main career focus.
But three months later, as that momentum should have been pushing me into a new career path (I was in fact due to move to Manchester from my home county Norfolk in March 2020 to begin a new job in international trade)…
…the world shut down.
Everything I had built up internally – all the confidence, all the drive, all the career growth and momentum – slammed straight into a wall of lockdown restrictions. Legally, physically, emotionally, I couldn’t move forward. Life was completely frozen.
That contrast – from the highest, most expansive year of my life to being restricted, by law, from leaving my home – created a kind of emotional whiplash I’d never experienced before, or that anyone had any blueprint for how to handle.
2020 was a strange year for everyone, and personally for me it was weird state of being on a high from my previous three years of progress and experiences (living in Singapore and achieving my Master’s degree in London the year before that), but also being completely halted in my progress towards my initial career plans and that continued sense of expansion.
Those two prior transformative experiences – moving to London and then Singapore – were all about expanding my horizons and worldview, and all of a sudden I was now ‘locked down’ in the confines of a new and restrictive world that no one envisaged or asked for.
There was the global anxiety, the pessimism, the fear and uncertainty we were all feeling. Like everyone, I had my own uniquely personal perspective that was simmering inside me:
It wasn’t just a bit of stress – it was a boiling mix of frustration, restlessness, and emotional weight. The year that should have been the start of my next chapter felt like it had been stolen from me.
For the first time in my life, I felt that if I didn’t channel all this energy and frustration somewhere, it would consume me.
And even though I was incredibly fortunate compared to most – living back home with my parents in the Norfolk countryside (where we would have themed weekends to make the most of it), surrounded by green space, with a garden (and a lot of my schoolfriends were also ‘back home’ so there were a lot of meetups when the rules allowed), and statistically one of the safest parts of England to be during the pandemic – the emotional impact was still very real.
Safety didn’t cancel out the feeling of being stuck. The contrast between the freedom I’d just had in Singapore and the stillness of rural lockdown life added another layer to the frustration brewing inside me.
As strange as it sounds, the lockdowns also created something I had not truly experienced since being a child with long school summer holidays: uninterrupted time.
Time with no distractions.
Time with no social plans, no commutes, no noise.
Time to think.
Time to create.
Time to build.
And eventually, with all that time, several things clicked in me – all the ambition and drive from Singapore, all the frustration from the lockdowns, all the lifelong dreams I’d had as a kid – suddenly aligned. It felt like fate, like a calling. As if all the circumstances, good and bad, were pushing me aggressively toward one path:
Build the art business now.
Go all in.
Give it 100%.
And that’s exactly what I did. After three or four months of trying to do my new job in Manchester remotely from my bedroom in Norfolk (without ever being able to meet the team or see the office), which couldn’t be done properly anyway and was providing absolutely no satisfaction or enjoyment, I handed my notice in and continued spending every spare hour working on another new painting for my now-expanding collection of music icon portrait paintings.
Because I finally had both the time and the emotional intensity, I used lockdown to build not just artwork – but an entire business. I was able to develop a proper strategy and plan for my new solo venture:
It’s important to note: even when I launched By Kerwin in 2019, I always planned for it to be primarily an e-commerce brand. I believed in the power of online business, in scalability, in global reach. I also knew building a digital building would play into my tech and graphic skills. When the world shut down in 2020, it didn’t derail that plan – it reaffirmed it. It proved the strategy right.
While most of the world paused, I spent countless hours laying the foundations of what By Kerwin would eventually become. (I also knew that regardless of how my art business progressed, at least I’d learn loads of new digital skills that would only be becoming more important in this new virtual world we were now living in.)
This was the behind-the-scenes work that no one saw – the hours and hours and hours on the commercial side learning, planning, brainstorming, experimenting, failing, improving – and of course creating the products – the paintings – and slowly building the foundations brick by brick.
The other side of the story – the part people rarely see – is how emotionally charged my creative process became during that period.
Painting became the outlet.
It became the pressure valve that allowed me to release everything I was feeling. All the frustration, all the pent-up anger, the lack of momentum, the anxiety, the doom and gloom, the boredom – all of it went straight onto the canvas and into my fledgling online business.
People often see my work as fun, uplifting, colourful, explosive – and it is, by intention. But the irony is that the fuel behind that brightness and vibrancy was some of the darkest emotional energy I’d ever carried.
While the world felt grey, my internal world felt chaotic.
While society felt bleak, the inside of my mind felt just stuck where it didn’t want to be.
And the only way out was through creation, in pursuit of a goal and dream I’d had for two decades.
In addition to being my life-long career goal – no, my internal purpose and north star in fact – building my art business now also became my coping strategy.
My way to feel alive, and my way to transform negativity into something positive.
My way to be able structure my days, to set daily and weekly targets I could achieve and then have a sense of satisfaction and accomplishment – and progress – when the weekend came around.
It was the process that kept me sane when everything else was collapsing – or at the very best just stagnate and at a stalemate.
Even though my style was already rooted in the Jackson Pollock–inspired action painting energy and movement (I first got this idea in spring 2019 and painted my first few portraits in my collection over the rest of 2019), something shifted during COVID.
I doubled down on colour.
I leaned into brightness and vibrancy – deliberately. The warm brown hues of my first painting in the collection, The Beatles, were actually chosen to neutrally blend into the wooden features of my home at the time – not to stand out. But that ‘blend in’ ethos didn’t stick.
While the world felt pessimistic and heavy, I went the opposite direction. I wanted my art to be the antidote to the negativity around me:
It didn’t feel optional – it felt necessary.
Creating bright, explosive art during that period wasn’t just an aesthetic choice. It was emotional resistance. It was a way to inject positivity and energy into a time that desperately needed it. In early 2020 I also decided to stick solely with the music and pop culture theme of my paintings, and to build my niche around that; recognising how these music subjects resonated with the sense of fun, optimism and timelessness I was looking to instill in my art.
What started as a way to stay afloat emotionally became the foundation for the business I run today.
The hours of practice, content creation when I started filming my painting process (I needed this video footage for my Facebook ads – as social media was the only way to build an audience as all galleries and events had shut down), marketing, learning, experimenting – they added up. Slowly, then suddenly:
By Kerwin wasn’t built from a masterplan. It was built from time, emotional pressure, and a deep internal drive to make something positive out of a negative situation. I was also determined not to lose the momentum of my previous years of personal growth in London and Singapore any more than I had to, and to honour the trajectory I had worked so hard to build for myself prior to 2020.
COVID didn’t create my talent or my initial idea to start an e-commerce art business – but it created the conditions that allowed the talent, the brand, and the business to flourish.
People see the highlights now – the painting videos, the shows, the prints, the clothing photoshoots, the collectors, the colours, the global exhibitions.
They see the fun, the energy, the positivity. Which I am absolutely chuffed and proud about.
But what they don’t see is the origin story:
They don’t see that the cheerful aesthetic was born from one of the most difficult emotional periods of my life – and for the world.
And that’s why this story matters.
Because the art may be bright – but the journey has depth and was fuelled by darkness.
I would never call the pandemic a blessing – it was a tragic and painful time for the world. But for me, personally, it became the unexpected push that changed the trajectory of my life and entrepreneurial career.
It gave me the time, the pressure, the emotional intensity, and the undeniable calling to finally pursue the dream I’d had since I was young – to create my own business, my own products, my own artistic universe.
It took the momentum I’d built in Singapore and London before that; halted it, crushed it, and then forced me to channel that energy somewhere entirely new.
And that “somewhere new” became By Kerwin.
The brand you see today exists because of that strange, difficult, transformative year.
The colours exist because the world felt grey.
The movement in my paintings exists because life felt frozen.
The energy exists because I needed an outlet.
And the business exists because, when everything stopped, I finally had the time to really get started on building my business.
Looking back now, the path feels almost fated – like everything that happened, good and bad, was pushing me towards this moment.
The worst global year of my lifetime accidentally created the most significant personal pivot of my career. A nightmare situation provided the conditions for me to realise a childhood dream.
And that is how COVID became the catalyst for By Kerwin.
If you’d like to discover other exclusive behind-the-scenes into how I built my art business, you can explore the rest of this blog section here. Take a look at a few other photos from getting By Kerwin off the ground in 2020 below.
My full range of Jackson Pollock-inspired acrylic pop art paintings can be viewed at bykerwin.com – the originals and prints of these are available to purchase, with worldwide delivery. You can also follow my art progress on Instagram and Facebook.
