Blood Falls 2014
2014 has been a disturbing backdrop of global, bloody conflicts: Syria-ISS-Iraq, Sunni-Shia, Hamas/Gaza-Israel, Ukraine-Russia, Sudan-South Sudan, to name just a few of the blood spots. A century ago, on June 28, 1914, the Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria was assassinated in Sarajevo, triggering World War I. The war to end all wars raised the level of human’s killing each other to new levels. That carnage has paled in the last one hundred years and tragically/pathetically continues. Mars, the Greek God of War, and his minions are watching from Olympus, or perhaps Lucifer through his lava vents and eruptions.
They must regard Homo sapiens with despair, disgust, or delight just from the 20th Century world wars alone: World I: 16 million killed; World War II: 60 million killed.
Armed conflicts continue to wreck havoc in the lives of countless innocent civilians and children. Check these links and weep:
– List of ongoing armed conflicts
– List of wars and anthropogenic disasters by death toll
| PRS Studio w Blood Falls 4Oct14 |
While working in the peace of Behta Pani, surrounded by our magic, old growth forest, focusing on my on-going Hirub nalla (stream) series, the news from CNN and BBC flooded our evening, satellite TV viewing. Overwhelming blood shed with all the civilian suffering… hundreds of Guernicas….with no Picasso to depict the horrific slaughter in black and white and all the shades of gray. We’ve all become numb from 65 years of fiery TV video rippling into our visual centers, barely raising a nerve-firing blip to register outrage in our heart-mind and demand an end to blood spilled.
During the May to September of painting Nature’s beauty, images of the water turning to blood kept surfacing while I worked in the studio. I resisted them for months, and then told them: “wait….let the Hirub stream paintings finish and you’ll have your due….” So, in the remaining few weeks before we departed our Himalayan abode, the painting series, Blood Falls began. Each painting is a small, symbolic image of the inhumane slaughter caused by our species. They’re subdued, nothing dramatic, just abstracted blood flowing over the darkened, intangible landscape. In a strange way, we are even drawn to death and blood, with it’s own dark beauty. And each one of us, even with the most vocal opposition, is part of the blood falling.
As the Indian enlightened philosopher/visionary mystic, Jiddu Krishnamurti (1895-1986) said:
We are bound to create war…
So long as we remain attached to a group or to an ideology, so long as we are ambitious, seeking success, we are bound to create war. It may not be a war of outward destruction, but we will have conflict between each other and within ourselves, which is actually a form of war. I do not think we see this, and even if we do, we are not serious about it. We want some miraculous event to take place to stop war, while we continue to live as we are in the present social structure, making money, seeking position, power, prestige, trying to become famous, and all the rest of it. That is our pattern, and so long as that pattern exists in our minds and hearts, we are bound to produce war.