Painting within a painting

2D, surrealism, illusionary, water colors on collage

The painting is basically very straight forward with big objects and bright colors.

I didn’t really go for any horizon line, but put everything into foreground. The clouds accidentally overlap the river which is great, as if the evil tries to penetrate the good.

The hair of the giant head represents the Sun with orange (sun) lines - very warm and positive. The head, with caramel color represents an island, a ground, soil, with forests or bushes (green eyes and nose). I wanted to give this side of the painting a happy, homy tone. The blue river with dark blue lines (that patterns with sun lines) has both crosshatching and brush strokes. Moving onto volcano and people’s heads (all male), the painting shows more of the brushstrokes.

The first meaning of the painting is Global Warming. The volcano is full of people who don’t fit the planet Earth anymore and who keep consuming and abusing it: that beautiful nature of Sun, island, and flowers (mouth on the island). However, the river divides the volcano and angry men from the nature with its powerful, cold (blue) force. 

The second meaning is Women in Politics. The Sun represents a hair of Hillary Clinton, presidential nominee in 2016; the island is her head, and the river stands for her famous blue suits. On the other side the heads  now represent angry male politicians. Actually, the volcano is full of them, who are all squeezed like on a busy bus, barking at each other, surfacing as an ominous smoke, and about to erupt. Reader, you don’t have to like Hillary of course, but the message here is how as a woman in politics, where “females” are still very rare, one has to work two to three times harder to push "her" agenda, and has to be the toughest of them all to survive in such an ambitious, aggressive, and dangerous environment if "she" wants to maintain "her" success on such intellectually high demanding level.

My professor also noticed the third description: the painting mimics a flag. Wow, what an observation! May I also attempt to push the fourth obvious one mentioned before (?): the eternal struggle between good and evil.

The ambiguous painting, in its simple and naive presentation, captures the essence of the year 2016, where global warming and presidential elections in the United States play a major role, in addition to unfortunate terrorism problem that escalated the same year.

P.S. My creative writing class was supposed to be the highlight of Spring semester among five subjects, but the Oscar goes to prof. Dahlia.