Painting: Remembering Those Suffering and Maybe, Just Maybe, Contemplating Doing Something about It... Except It's Just Art.

"Remembering Those Suffering and Maybe, Just Maybe, Contemplating Doing Something about It... Except It's Just Art" is one of the rare few paintings in the religious series inspired by a photograph (New York Times, September 24, 1997, Agence France-Presse), but while it shows some semblance with the original, it actually rebels against it, or attempts to do so.  To photograph the scene or replicate it via oil on canvas may help report on, and even capture, some of the truth, but the after-the-fact nature of the event (a tragedy has already occurred) and the root causes of it happening in the first place, cannot be reversed, at least for now. What difference does art make? But that's the point, isn't it? Art may not make much of a difference, yet that's what makes it universal and perennial. I hardly have a political agenda and don't exactly see colors as an impetus for change, although grief sure is. The image references a massacre in Algiers, but, tragically, it could happen anywhere.