48x60 Acrylic/ Stretched Canvas/ Resin Coated. Ready to hang. 

“I’ve read so many books about the Holocaust,” I said to my counselor when I was 25. “It isn’t the death, starvation, and camps that horrify me. It’s the way people lived their lives all over the world as it was happening, and said nothing.” 

She remarked, “Well it makes perfect sense why you would feel that way. You weren’t given space for a voice about what happened.” 

She got a book off of her endless shelves of books. “This is a good one. Left to Tell by Immaculée Ilibagiza. Not only does she experience horror and survival, when she does have a voice - she uses it for forgiveness. Her story will teach you the process.” 

I was not excited about this. In 2009 the last thing I needed was another process to process. My face clearly said this without a sound. She responded, “Not only does she survive, and understand what happened - she forgives everything, and stands in the power as a creator, not a victim. Do you want freedom? Forgiveness is the only way to be free. You have to look at it all first to let it go.” Aghast at her statement, but desperate for freedom, I took the book and read it. 

The writing was rich at first, like a hug. Written in the best way - with the author's heart, and through all of the senses. Family members and favorite blankets, sunsets, walks, wind, grass, pets. I wanted to go to Rwanda. Her family was happy, in a normal village. They all loved each other. It felt simple. Peaceful. 

And then, everyone was massacred. By their neighbors. She wrote all of that with her heart and all of her senses, too. 

In one hundred days, one million people died. The whole thing was fueled by propaganda, then silence. It was 1994. I was eleven.

1994. When Kurt Cobain died, Forrest Gump came out, and Friends premiered.  The world just kept on worlding. 

At 25, I went home to my Dad, I asked accusingly -

“How could this happen?! And how could I know nothing about this happening?” He told me I didn’t understand what destabilized parts of the world were like. “Out there, they kill each other. It has nothing to do with us.” 

But to me, I had been alive on this planet living my life in the fourth grade. So it felt like it had a lot to do with me. Were people continents away really so different from me just because they were far away? Did they not love their pets the same as I did, celebrate their birthdays, and get excited about new clothes and good food? I didn’t understand what there wasn’t to understand about that. 

Growing up I always heard it from the adults around me “Another bleeding heart liberal was having feelings.” I felt silly for having feelings about a million people being slaughtered 16 years ago and let it go. There must have been something I wasn’t understanding. 

When I finished reading Left to Tell I had a burst of energy and painted a canvas with every color of paint I had. Back then it was 3-ounce bottles of $2 craft paint. I titled the art “Operation Turquoise.” That was the name of the French Military intervention that was deployed, along with humanitarian aid, to create a safe zone for survivors escaping the genocide.

I didn’t know it at the time, but like the French militia of salvation, my paintings will become the intervention that provides me with a safe space to be and feel. The more color they have, the more light I have identified in the dark and the more powerful the message. 

I’m forty now. Another genocide is in full swing. There aren’t machetes this time, only ideology, separation, funding, and bombs. This one is in my face on a screen. I know that I’m in this world, not of it. I know that it is my responsibility not to let my emotions and reactions to those emotions drag me around like wild horses. 

Which I have to remind myself of a lot. 

On my phone from my couch, cuddled with my dachshunds - a toddler is screaming for her mother in a sea of concrete rubble as bombs rain. The screen vibrates with each blast. Flames erupt in the distance. The video flips. The next - an influencer with giant lips, a fake tan, and a bold glamor filter on is selling me a $400 hairbrush. She tells me I need it to look my best, and that if I look my best, I will feel my best. Scroll on. 

The balance between total desensitization, gut-wrenching horror and feelings of not just helplessness, but complicity. Complicity as in I voted for the administration that is funding the weapons, blocking humanitarian aid, and releasing the propaganda that if I am anti-genocide I am anti-Jewish people, and I am pro-Hamas. Which is fucking insanity. 

I’m watching elected officials calling their constituents terrorists for asking them why they are voting against humanitarian aid and a cease-fire. The same people who own the politicians on both sides of the aisle also own the media. Words and propaganda are what get neighbors murdering their neighbors over differences. This is not about Democrats and Republicans. This is about the blatant awareness that both sides were purchased by the same people and have only focused on us fighting so we can’t even speak about politics. 

The only platform that brings the truth of the experiences of the people oppressed is also where I sell my art. I feel gross about that. “Hey I see you fighting for your life and all of your children dying and you risking your entire future to bravely protest but here is my painting that has nothing to do with the reality that the country I live in is helping create. We’re safe over here. Hope you like the glitter” 

What is the balance between the child in the concrete rubble screaming for her dead mother and the influencer selling a hairbrush? I don’t know. 

But I didn’t come this far for everything scary, horrifically unjust, or uncomfortable to speak about to simply be something “over there” and “not my problem” or “dramatic.” Maybe I do understand enough to speak up. I mean who cares what I’m saying? But I care what my art is saying, how, to whom, and at what time in history. 

Yes, I’m a bleeding heart. Not a liberal. Not a conservative. I’m a whole-ass American trying to survive in this lie of a system that they sold us, and my heart hurts. I have drastically compartmentalized pain and hiding, speaking up and silence, the truth and the lies of omission - my entire adult life to feel safe, loved, cared for, and acceptable. 

I’m out of compartments. I’m done with my comfort and perception of acceptance being more important than the bigger picture of what is really going on with people and how that feels, regardless of what they look like or what part of the planet they live on. 

I scratched a bunch of lines into the biggest canvas I work with and started filling them in with color. For years now I have kept my art to a specific size because I know how to ship it. I have often learned lately that the more I am focused on an outcome, the more fragmented the process. So I painted compartments for days, trying to process everything that’s going on in the world by calmly drawing line, after line, after line, after line. Hoping some kind of understanding or sense would reach me. It has yet to. 

The only thing I have ever prayed for is willingness and alignment. When I use a lot of color and not a fixed pallet in a piece that means I’m being brave. When the art is big, I feel loud. And as a pathological people pleaser who just wants people to love, feel, and identify with what I create so I can pay my rent - oh well. 

It’s time to stretch and expand. 

My husband woke up this morning. He said, “I love that painting so much. When I look at it, I see Africa.”

It occurred to me that being big, loud, brave, and bright is a defiant act of revolution right now. It is the only thing I can think of to do. Talk about what is happening, and balance it with a visual that is immersive and beautiful. Maybe then we can both understand, but at the same time escape the horror and identify with the light together too. 

I’m out of compartments. 

How are you?