Peace Flows
Peace Flows
Acrylic and Marker on Canvas
(This piece was created for a WCA competition themed peace for the anniversay of Nelson Mandela's death)
The artist statment follows:
In the eyes of the world we are all made of stardust. Amidst the universal chaos we can find peace. Peace in nature and in a shared human experience. Peace in change as we find our universal flow.
In this image we see things as the world might; in a broader sense. People and creatures from across the world are made up of the same things. Hidden in the peace dove's feathers are the elements of you, me and the rest of the world. Stardust flows through the image making up different people, environments and religions for everyone to experience together.
The law of conservation of energy states that energy can be neither created nor destroyed, but can only change form. We are all the same, made of energy, changing into one another as we experience life. We all want our experiences to be happy. Finding peace with one another is how that starts. We just need to look through the world's eye.
About the Image (What you are looking at)
The beginning of the image started with creating an eye out of the world to represent a different way of seeing things. I incorporated many symbols including a pride rainbow (red representing life, orange = healing, yellow = sunlight, green = nature, blue = art, indigo = harmony, and violet = human spirit), located all around the painting are 34 different religiuos symbols (in similar rainbow colors acting as "stars" and actually becoming a part of some of the smaller environments. Each symbol representing a star has a texture and color radiating, sprialing, speckaling or coming from it in some way, so that it becomes a bigger part of the "whole"), a peace dove is also represented flying into view.
The environments depicted are interpretated from a facebook poll I put out regarding what everyone thought peace was. I also added a few of my own ideas. In the lower right we see colorful star people
riding in a boat with their dog. Two of the star people are pointing to what they are looking at, a sea turtle and a spouting whale's tail.
Moving up the right side of the painting, some reeds and cat tails come into view at the water's edge. Wrapping around the painting and moving into the upper right of the image is a rainbow eucalyptus tree which is really rainbow colored (google an image if you have never seen one, they are awesome). Sitting among the tree limbs is another person reading a book glowing with a story or knowledge. The symbol for humanitarianism is also playing; hanging in the branches.
Circling around to the upper left we pass by people in a hot air balloon pointing to all they see below them.
Moving down the left side we see an adult hand in hand with a child pointing to the misty evergreen forest they are walking through. Down underneath the dove wings are Two stargazers in the desert next to a bonfire, with a scorpion sitting around the edge.
Moving into the dove itself, are all of the elements of the periodic table, making up all that we know,
color coded. The eyelashes of the world wrap up into the stars once again connecting everything as a similar whole.
Finishing in and on the rainbow we see a cyclist riding around the "red of life". Finally, what's life wthout another sea turtling riding up the rainbow? As an homage to Grupo Ecológico de la Costa Verde an organization I love and am a part of helping to save the wonderful creatures.
MarkJoy
