Hope’s Fire– Coming to Principle Gallery
Prudence never kindled a fire in the human mind…
–Aldo Leopold, The River of the Mother of God
The new painting, Hope’s Fire, above is coming with me for this coming Saturday’s Gallery Talk at the Principle Gallery. It’s a smaller piece, coming in at 9″ by 12″ on canvas.
The title came from the contrast of the Red Tree set against the somewhat washed-out blues and greens around it. The paleness of the background immediately felt to me to be symbolic of a fading of hope for the future. The kind that becomes ingrained and normalized after years of struggle, causing people to lose their enthusiasm and become less involved in shaping their own future. The passion to resist and persist wanes.
The fire within goes low.
The disinterested then becomes overcautious, trying to preserve what one has with as little struggle as possible. But as conservationist Aldo Leopold so aptly points out, prudence never kindled a fire in the human mind.
Changing the future is an act of passion and desire, achieved by those willing to stand up and risk failing.
That is all rhetorical on paper. Hard to transfer the idea of passion and fire to reality. But I personally hold out optimism in the current generation of youths that I see taking a larger politically active stance. They see that the future is where they will live and that they should have a larger part in how it will be shaped. They shouldn’t leave it to the older generations who have plundered the past and forsaken the future.
I’ve held this hope for decades that the youth of the world would finally see the future as theirs to form and make their voices heard at the voting booth. My boomer generation never fully reached the promise they once held in this manner nor did the following generations.
We never burned fully. always fizzling out before we forged the future we wanted.
But his new one seems to better understand what is at stake, that they have real political leverage to exert. That their power of the vote can yet overcome the power of extreme wealth. That is, no doubt, why one party is working so hard to disenfranchise their vote.
I see in this new generation a kindled and building fire. It’s the hope I see in the Red Tree in this painting.
I hope I am right and that they can make their fire reach its promise.
Here’s a song in that vein for this week’s Sunday Morning Music. It’s the song from the New Radicals that made them a one-hit wonder in the late 1990’s, You Get What You Give. The band disbanded after one album but reunited to perform this song for the Biden Inauguration in 2021 after they found out that the song was a favorite with the Bidens while they were going through son Beau Biden’s bout with cancer.
Give a good listen and try to kindle your own fire.
And if you can’t do that, fire up someone else. The future depends on it.
REMINDER
What: GALLERY TALK
Who: With GC MYERS
Where: PRINCIPLE GALLERY, Alexandria VA
When: SATURDAY, SEPTEMBER 30, Beginning at 1 PM
Why: It’s free, fun, informative, and there will be a free drawing for the painting below, On the Rise.
And more!
On the Rise– You Could Win This Painting!
Redtree Times 