Chaos and Hope

I have not posted to this blog in a while and have decided to present some of my artwork here in a more open and informal forum as a way of encouraging dialogue about them.

My two latest paintings, one on canvas and the other, digital, are from the same spirit. Both represent Chaos and Hope as converging realities where the endgame in the resolution of conflict is always positive and beneficial. Both offer spiritual illumination and wisdom as a path to Peace and Harmony. The path is via equanimity, inherent in coexistence and non-judgment. It is in the understanding that all things influence each other, and that the power of presence and awareness is a universal vital force that is in alignment with Divinity and Goodness. This vital force moves light as well as darkness, life as well as death, goodness as well as evil. Peace comes from knowing which alignment is beneficial in the long term.

Converging Realities – The Emergence of Being
Acrylics on canvas 24″ X 30″
April 2023

In Converging Realities – The Emergence of Being, multiple realities converge, yet coexist in a flattened timeline in a pictorial compositional division of four to one. Dark despair, chaos, and destruction are dominant in the upper square area (4/5) of the painting. Those realities range from old sea battles to modern bombed-out cities; from the mindless exploitation of the earth’s resources underlying the mercurial climatic changes that lead to killer cyclones, flooding, disastrous droughts and burning forests to the excessive unhealthy pollution of our air and waters. They are also in shining glass-towered metropolises that defy the gravity of an unfortunate human disconnect with Nature, and reflect, at the same time, monumental greed oozing from the sullied hands of indulgent individualism and consumerism. Near the centre of this multifaceted world in crisis is a vortex, rotating in an anticlockwise direction, and churning out much death and destruction. We are literally drowning in our own excessive obsession with wealth and privilege.

The bottom fifth of the painting expresses illumination of the human spirit coexisting harmoniously with the other realities, but from a space of deep consciousness. A golden aura radiates from a lone meditator, symbolic of divine presence. A second vortex appears on the left, rotating in a clockwise direction like a light warm breeze gently moving inland. The calm, powerful and radiant energy of this space mollifies the oil polluted river running through it, and allows a white lotus to bloom, symbol of purity, wisdom and resilience.

Phoenix’s Rising – Christina’s Woken
Original digital painting
April 2023

Phoenix’s Rising – Christina’s Woken: In a hypothetical near future, Chaos may seem victorious after defeating Liberty, the allegorical goddess-figure immortalized in Eugene Delacroix’s famous romantic era painting, Liberty Guiding the People, which represented the political upheavals in France during the early 1800s. Here the political upheaval is projected onto the American continent, where ironically, the Statue of Liberty, a gift of the French Republic, stands guard over all of Western Democracy. The potential death and destruction in any eventual civil conflict today are accentuated by some morbid images taken from Théodore Géricault’s The Raft of the Medusa. Another icon, taken from an American artist, Andrew Wyeth’s Christina’s World, symbolic of a traditional American ruralism, reinforces the resilience of the democratic spirit. With Liberty imaginably defeated in the flames of destruction of America’s great metropolis, she spectacularly reincarnates as Phoenix, rising out of the ashes, and bringing hope through light. Phoenix, with her gift to us of a large white lotus flower, symbolic of her wisdom and resilience, represents a not-so-new American ideal, and perhaps, a new democratic world order. She offers testimony and hope to American indigenous peoples, African-American descendants of enslaved people, all immigrants and refugees to America, then and now, from lands across the globe. She shows that perseverance in holding on to one’s dream, commitment to integrity, and sacrifice of immediate and superficial pleasures often follow a long and winding road to self-realization. Like the lotus flower that blossoms out of the mud, those that finally arrive home, understand that the route to get there was the real prize.

This blog is dedicated to my dear deceased friend, Rosie Sapadin, a French holocaust survivor, whose disposition, authenticity and gentleness despite her early challenges and later health issues will always be an inspiration to me; to Tirtzah, and our meditation group in Delray Beach, Florida, who allow me the space to grow and to share my idealism, my love and my conviction that we all can contribute in building a better world, one thought, one word, one action, one relationship and one community at a time.

Blessings,
Andrew
Pax, Lux et Amor

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I invite you also to visit the different rooms in my Art Gallery.