Darkness or Light

The choice is ours.

In the 3rd month of pandemic quarantine (March 25, 2020) George Floyd was murdered under the knee of a white Minneapolis police officer and streets around the world erupted with protests. Unable to march, I stayed in my studio and worked on this painting every day for several weeks.

I worked spontaneously and intuitively without a plan or design. This painting expresses my feelings about my country, and the choices we are making as a species about how we live. But it is within our power as individuals to change. We can stop hate, lessen climate change, breed compassion, rebuke greed, deconstruct injustice, and choose to walk in light instead of darkness. 

The painting’s narrative starts at the bottom left, with our earliest human art and inspirations. Symbols and marks like the crosshatches, animals, figures, and dots have meaning dating back to the Paleolithic era. The voluptuous female figure evokes ancient goddess/fertility icons of our distant human past. In her heart she holds the grail cup, a mythic symbol of human compassion and grace. She merges with a fierce God-like tiger, their yin and yang dynamic energies embracing and supporting each other.  Moving upward we find ourselves in a natural utopia of animals, plants, and waterfalls, with a shining (accented with golden metallic paint) supernatural figure holding a sun-like beacon in one hand while gesturing benevolently to the Earth, waters, animals, moon, and heavens with the other. This being is an apotheosis of human potential, a caretaker of the natural world.

Moving left to right, top to bottom, we swiftly transition from a world of ecstatic nature to a shadow realm inhabited by guns, industry, pollution, fear, faceless incarcerated people and police, tanks, missiles, and grinding machines. In this bleak landscape darkness reigns and life is cheap. 

The bottom of this painting is unfinished: spilled paint and pencil marks on unprimed canvas. The future is yet to be written. 

Read more about this painting in Artists on Art.

Darkness and Light 72″ H x 52″ W ~ 3 part oil and assemblage painting/construction. Signed on verso. 

Exhibiting and available at SOLA Contemporary Gallery, in the show “FRESH” – 3718 W Slauson Ave, Los Angeles, CA 90043 through Oct 9, 2021

Darkness and Light

Gods of earth and food
Gods of steel and blood
God built the Rainbow
To help us bridge the flood.
Gods of nature,
Gods of blight-
We sit in darkness
But pray for light.

Tear gas presidents,
Poems painted on roadways;
Gunshots in the alleys,
Angels in the words we say.
A baby’s first laugh,
A world in disarray:
Every minute is night, 
Every minute is day.

Threatened by all things,
Threatened by Cain-
We break the covenant
Again and again.
Gods of nature, 
Gods of blight.
Gods made from darkness,
Gods made from light.

Our oldest stories tell of
Black and White,
Blindness and Sight,
Might against Right.
We must face the forest to find the light,
All of our fears despite,
To seize the day 
and end this night.

~s.stone 2020