In-process painting, inspired by Carl Sagan quote, planned for "Visual Spirituality Show"
/My second painting for The Creative Center's "Visual Spirituality Show" isn't nearly as completed as the one in my post Jeffrey Dunne's beach sunrise photo inspired my newest oil painting. Here's what I'm using to accompany this painting, called 'A Pale Blue Dot', a part of a Carl Sagan quote, which will be posted beside it in the show.
“You see a dot. That’s here. That’s home. That’s us. On it, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever lived, lived out their lives. The aggregate of all our joys and sufferings, thousands of confident religions, ideologies and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilizations, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every hopeful child, every mother and father, every inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every superstar, every supreme leader, every saint and sinner in the history of our species, lived there on a mote of dust, suspended in a sunbeam.
Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity — in all this vastness — there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves. It is up to us. It’s been said that astronomy is a humbling, and I might add, a character-building experience. To my mind, there is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly and compassionately with one another and to preserve and cherish that pale blue dot, the only home we’ve ever known.”
There is much to be done before this piece, which is 40 x 40, will be finished.
In my 'artist's eye' I see stars on the horizon in the finished painting, not just the planets which are found in our galaxy, but so, so much more. The shaft of light represents us in time and space, and eventually will be warmer because of the sun. To truly embrace our spiritual aspects, we humans must come to the realization that we're just a speck of dust in the cosmos. This is the message I mean to convey in the completed painting. When finished, a photo will be posted on this site and on Facebook as well.
