A painted protest

I wanted to share this, because I'm proud to have created it but because it's overlaid with a photo from the National Archive I feel a little bit anxious about claiming it on a larger scale.

The original painting was created during the Kavanaugh hearings, and expressed my frustrations with what was happening in government at the time.

But it was purchased by someone I suspect was a veteran of the Viet Nam War: he had a Vietnamese wife, and he told me it was the first painting he had ever purchased.

So when I was asked to create an image that summarized my college years, I immediately thought of this one, because those years were so dominated by the war protests and the fear of the draft.

I knew I wanted to layer in an image of some soldiers, so I searched on line and found this one. And when I put it all together -- the angry, colored painting and the black and white photo -- I realized it also reflected not just the civil rights issues that were going on while I was in college, but the Black Lives Matter issues still going on today, on Juneteenth.

And so I share it here. I don't know if I'll have time to paint today -- I have a lot of packing to do -- but this is on my mind, and it's a way of expressing yet again the horror I feel at all the ways our society doesn't live up to its stated goals of equality, life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness for all.