|
Human Natures |
"Ode to Anne Frank" showed up in my high school freshman art class a few years after I read her diary. Her experience had haunted me, spawning nightmares and claustrophobic fear, until this painting surfaced in a stream of my consciousness. A few years ago, I found it in the basement. Its burnt umber, sienna and antique white oil colors were cracked and peeling, but the positions of mother and daughter remained. Oil pastels revived them, and although, of necessity, their facial expressions changed, their spirit did not.
In Manhattan to attend art school, I encountered homeless people, which shocked my sheltered innocence, horrifying me until they appeared on my paper and canvas, helping me to live with this new knowledge. Back then, nothing suggested that I would become an activist to help raise awareness of every family's vulnerability to homelessness through sudden poverty or other disability.
My friends Milton and Anne Rogovin introduced me to Kathe Kollwitz through her art, journals and correspondence. "Ode to Kathe Kollwitz" was inspired by her activism against Hitler, war and poverty.
The film "Sometimes in April" began with the Rwandan president's plane being shot out of the sky. The resulting oil pastel, "Genocide: 1994," ignited heated controversy when viewed at an open portfolio session with gallery owners and museum curators. Even one of the artists agreed with them that, not being black, I had no right to paint them or their history. Happily, my friends of many skin colors know that genocide crosses every line. And none of us can deny the catastrophic consequences of greed everywhere.
"Cardinal Ratzinger, the Pope" and "Out of Nowhere" speak of other bestial acts perpetrated by elements of human nature.
Limbo, addiction (money, power, drugs, booze, food, sex and other degradations of the human soul) and sorrow, and romance and love guide human nature, bringing out the best, sometimes the worst, in all of us. At least today most citizens of most nations are aware of world events as they unfold on ever expanding electronic media. The truth is spun so many ways, and money blinds so many to the spiritual connection we have to the universal originator of creation. The One who created The Golden Rule, treat others the same way you want to be treated. Respect for life is the guiding light for too few people in power. Until Barack Hussein Obama became leader of the free world. March 23, 2010, President Obama signed the healthcare reform bill into law: A Giant Step for Mankind. April 8, 2010, Pres. Obama persuaded the old USSR into signing a Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty. We are on our way to a much more just world. But greed is a powerful enemy and it is time that all who care about all human beings and all life work to make the world best for the majority of its inhabitants.
|
|
|
|
|
Images 1
to 3
of 30
|
Next
|
|
|
.gif){kind=small}