Japan, Expression of Hope Oil Painting

Our Wednesday night art class assignment was to paint a modern art piece.

Well...... modern art is not really my thing but I thought to myself, “hey I was just at the Dali Museum about a month ago...so that should help.

As the instructor laid out some random objects in a pile on the table, our directive was not necessarily to render what was there but to use our imagination and work from the shapes of the objects .....I’ll admit I was perplexed ....what do you do with a few odd looking boxes, some plastic flowers, apples and a plastic eggplant on top of it all ?......strange !

After some thought and a few thumb nail sketches in my pad, all I kept seeing was a heap of junk on a table, it was a mess.

So I drew my thoughts inward for a moment and all I could think of was the horror in Japan.

With the earthquake damage and Sunimi devastation weighing heavy on my mind, I started to wonder if I could express that emotion on canvas.

I looked hard at the set up and the boxes became homes, the flowers trees, the apples people and the eggplant on top of it all was a black surge of water.

With a modernistic, minimalist approach. I drew from only the most powerful shape, the black surge of water....A.K.A. eggplant.

Using the colors of the Japanese sun disc flag I twisted the shapes to represent a surge of turbulent sea.

To the right is the Japanese word for hope, as this is the only word I can comprehend for the tragedy cast upon the Japanese people.