BROKEN HOPE (2014)

This painting began with my feeling about life's disappointments and lost opportunities.  The large human face in profile represent one person’s life journey. It begins full of potential,  brimming with hope for a promising future.  The bright yellow paint is a symbol of this positive, creative, hopeful energy.  The cracked blue area in the centre represents this same life, years later with all hopes shattered.  All around are many hidden portraits, multiple shadowy images like ghosts of the past, representing the complexity of a life's journey, full of wrong decisions, missed opportunities and paths not taken.  These were my first feelings, but as I worked on this painting I thought about the condition of all human life on Earth and realised the work is my metaphor for the evolution of all humanity.  Human beings were born into a natural paradise with the ability to make choices about how life unfolds.  But we have not chosen a positive path; the large yellow profile symbolises the human race continually evolving into the future and the cracked blue is the broken hope of our past and present.  All around the hidden faces represent key events from human  history, which is littered with suffering, death and destruction.  I imagine that thousands of years ago, an ancient ancestor once stood at the dawn of our human time, full of aspirations, thinking about the many possibilities life can offer, and wondering about what may unfold in future.  If we could transport this person to the present time, looking back over our human journey, what would be the thoughts about the path we have taken?   My feeling is that there would be great sorrow, huge disappointment, with all hope for the future shattered into tiny pieces.  When I think about all of the destructive forces at work in the world today, it makes me wonder what it will take for humanity to wake up and choose a more positive path.  But I fear we will wake up too late, only opening one eye when we are on the brink of the precipice, facing the consequences of our own destructive tendencies.