Lewiston artist Angie Lafrance in her home studio with some of her digital illustrations. After seeing her work on Instagram, a BBC reporter reached out asking to use it to illustrate a story about coping with isolation during the pandemic. Submitted photo

LEWISTON — Lewiston native Angie Lafrance lost her job at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Locked down in her apartment with just her cat, Lola, Lafrance turned to her artwork, posting illustrations on Instagram of a woman scrolling through her phone in the dark, cat perched on her back, and a woman eating takeout in her underwear, wearing a high bun, nose buried in a magazine.

An isolation illustration by Lewiston artist Angie Lafrance, a series showing a woman and her cat on lockdown. Submitted photo

Four weeks later, the BBC reached out, asking to use her art in a story on coping with isolation.

“Not only did it feel like such a major milestone to have my work published by one of the top news sources in the world, but it was also just the kind of experience I needed at that time, being so isolated,” said Lafrance, 34.

There was, of course, in a pandemic twist, no celebrating with friends and family — “I just kind of went about my evening with me and my cat. We watched a movie” — but the messages online started pouring in immediately from people around the world.

They got her. And looking at her art, she got them.

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“Everything that day happened so fast, it just blew up,” Lafrance said. “Isolation makes you feel so alone, but in reality, you’re connected to all these people.”

Lafrance grew up in Lewiston and started drawing and painting at a young age, going through books of Norman Rockwell paintings with her grandmother and making up their own illustrations.

“I really love vintage illustration,” she said. “I always used to tell her I wanted to be an illustrator like Norman Rockwell someday.”

She studied at the Maine College of Art, worked off and on for her parents at East Coast Signs in Lewiston and worked in freelance design, with art becoming more of a hobby than a focus.

She’d been at her full-time office job for two years when the pandemic hit. The company initially called a meeting.

“They told us they were going to do all that they could to get through it, and then five to seven days after that, I get a phone call and they’ve laid a good majority of us off,” she said. “I was in some kind of, ‘Now what?’ I was jobless and held up in my apartment by myself. I was having trouble sleeping, and it was stressful, so at night I was doing these digital illustrations, they were isolation illustrations, basically, about a woman in her apartment with her cat.”

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When the messages poured in after the BBC story, in which the writer also interviewed Lafrance, a friend suggested she started illustrating some of their isolation stories.

“I did one for a girl in South Korea who said she had been journaling a lot and it was really helping her,” she said. “I did another one for a woman in Mexico, who her father was really ill from cancer, so she was going through that, but also really worried because COVID made that even more scary. She had picked up painting again.”

A woman eating takeout and reading a magazine in Lewiston artist Angie Lafrance’s series on isolation during the pandemic. Submitted photo

Another woman from Queens, New York was re-teaching herself the ukulele, which Lafrance related to. “At that time, I’d also learned the ukulele but had put it down for some time. During quarantine I had picked it back up.”

Print sales picked up on her Etsy shop, Ramble Row, from all of the exposure and Lafrance has had more people reaching out for personal commissions. She designed the label art for Sonder & Dram’s to-go cocktails. Before the pandemic, she painted a mural at The Curio in the upstairs mezzanine on Lisbon Street and is in talks locally to work on another mural.

She’s posted time-lapsed video of some of her work on her Ramble Row YouTube channel.

“This isolation and the illustrations it all started with, it resparked that flame in me and that passion for my artwork,” Lafrance said. “That happening with the BBC, I felt like was kind of a sign that you should take this opportunity of being laid off, being locked down to really work on your art, build your portfolio, get some experience with illustration and try to make a go at it.”

So for now, she will hit it hard, with Lola’s company.

“I’m playing it by ear, like so many of us are,” Lafrance said. “I plan my future out like a week to two weeks’ at a time. If I get through those two weeks, what’s the plan for the next couple? It’s really all we can do.”


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