lately i’ve been getting sort of fired up about world events (many of you poor souls may have been subjected to my email rants and forwards). i must admit that evan and i have become sort of addicted to the news. the problem with this is that ‘the news’ as we know it hardly ever reports anything good. we have to be careful to not let what gets reported shape our view of humanity and the world.
sure, there are heinous, evil things happening every day, and yes, we need to know about them so that we as citizens of this planet can rise up and work for change. but we must also remember that perhaps for every bad thing that happens, there are at least 10 good things that happen, yet these good things seldom get reported or are seen as ‘news-worthy’.
with all of this swirling around in my head, i started thinking more about making political art. creating art that makes a statement about humanity and spirituality is not new for me. but creating art that has specific geo-political overtones is new. however, i’m not interested in making art that complains about leaders or endorses a specific political party. besides, there’s enough of that around already.
rather, i’m more interested in making art that promotes peace and the things that bring us together as humans.
so i’ve started getting into translating certain words like: love, truth, beauty, and world peace into other languages that are more artistic than ours. arabic, hindi, hebrew, greek, korean, chinese, japanese are all languages that look very different from our own. arabic and chinese in particular are incredibly beautiful to look at.
and i started thinking, if the pen is mightier than the sword, and if words are powerful weapons, then what if i started using words as instruments of peace ? what would it mean to an iraqi or chinese citizen to see art by an american that says positive things in their language?
sunday i began a new piece of art–it has a long way to go, but i’ll show you the skeleton here below, just a preliminary underpainting. also, here are the words i painted in arabic, greek, hindi and japanese: beautiful, dream, calm.
