HOPE
A narrative work depicting the atrocities of political greed from the past 2 centuries.
Below is the poem "hope" written by Luba:
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she stands before you
her eyes speak...
the air i breathe
the bread i taste
sounds of laughter and joy,
a simple prayer.
lost.
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greed, why haven't you gone?
have you not learned?
you stand alone, a coward.
a soul consumed and vision blinded.
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you have seen my eyes,
you know what they say
and yet you look the other way,
for you have sold the light of hope...
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if only you didn't look away.
177x69 oil on canvas
Details of "Hope"
In the past two centuries, political greed has destroyed lives, families, religion, morality and countries. The most devastating is the unimaginable suffering of the innocent children.
My hope is to remind the world of these horrors so that history will not repeat itself.
Although hundreds of atrocities occurred in our world, I selected these children from history, placed here on my canvas. From right to left are the children that have suffered:
The Potato Famine; Children of Chernobyl, Ukraine; Holocaust; Stalin's Holodymyr-The Artifical Famine 1932; World War I & II; Asian Slave Labor; Slavery; an innocent child today.
Picasso's brilliance of color from his Rose & Blue Periods became my palette to juxtapose the bounty of life in bloom in rose above against the cold blue below representing death and suffering. Picasso's "La bomba" light bulb from his Guernica painting, hangs center, representing a bomb of greed and corruption. I subconsciously painted an angel holding two children in the top right and a soldier center holding a child limp in his arms.
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a close up of a child wrapped in rags suffering from starvation in Ukraine. Stalin's artificial famine 1932-1933, starved and murdered 20 million Ukrainian men, women & children.
The Holocaust child in his striped rags suffered unimaginable pain, fear and ultimate death, murdered by Hitler in gas chambers; a child in Ukraine at a hospital with an IV. One of the many hospitals that my family's foundation helped set up to save the children from the poisons of radiation from the world's worst nuclear disaster, Chernobyl, Ukraine. Gorbachev, USSR Leader, forced the Ukrainian Children to parade on May 1, 1986 under the invisible fallout of radiation to cleanse Ukraine of its citizens as part of the russification of the bread basket of Europe, Ukraine and at the same time denied the world the knowledge of the disaster until it was too late. Many surrounding countries suffered and countless children died of radiation poisoning.
a close up of the African-American slave boy in the cotton fields forced into slavery; the Asian slave labor child forced to work in horrible conditions still to this day; and the boy seated representing the sufferings of World War I & II.
a child of today, far right, unaware of history and the horrors of political greed as he walks into a city looking. He holds a teddy bear with a tag "made in china", a symbol of our economic collapse and ultimate loss of freedom. And the mask, a symbol of political greed and Big Pharma.