Travel Art

COMING JANUARY 2019

All entries here are place holders.  Standby for the real deal coming January 2019!

A Different Way to Process

Distance, language, borders, and culture. These are things that separate us across the globe. But after making my way through every inhabited continent,  I have come to believe that we are all more the same than we are different. At the end of the day, whether you wear a cross or a burka; whether you watch cricket or futbol; whether you are pale as a ghost or dark as midnight – most of us want the same things. We all want to put in a hard day’s work, come home for dinner, have a beer (or tea) with our buds, kiss our spouses good morning and our kids goodnight.

We can be divided or united by the actions of a few.  Traveling through the Balkans, The Middle East, Indonesia, and Colombia shook me to the core. Seeing the scars of war and befriending the myriad of souls that have survived – or are currently living through – periods of extreme violence is a humbling experience to say the least. In Sarajevo, we sat with survivors of the Bosnian War as these soldiers and civilians brought to life the atrocities I remember seeing on the TV as a kid. Suddenly a place that seemed so far away felt like home. Romania, the country of my great-grand parents, is home to many new friends. These friends shared their accounts of life in their homeland before and after the fall of the Iron Curtain.

In Palestine, we experienced apartheid in the first world front and center.  As we made our way into Tel Aviv, we waved goodbye to friends who were not able to cross checkpoints simply because they were Arab. We saw teenagers from the jewish settlements carrying machine guns, while Arab teenagers with rocks sit in jail with no access to family. When we crossed Asia into the Australian continent, a man in West Papua opened his grass hut doors to us and regaled us with his tales of fleeing his home in West Papua to Port Moresby, Papua New Guinea after being attacked for speaking out against the Indonesian invasion. And in Colombia, the violence of the FARC and the cartels still rain down on many parts of the country – striking fear into the hearts of civilians – many of whom we now call family.

I can not believe I have had the dumb luck to be born into a financial stable family in a wonderful area of the US.  I am white and middle class. I have been blessed to not have experienced the horrors of war or discrimination first hand.  Seeing and hearing what others have gone through, especially those who, despite having seen the worst of what humanity can do one another, are positive people who radiate love, acceptance, and humility, has been my most life-changing experience to date.

I was so touched by the stories I heard along the way in my travels that I was inspired to create a few art pieces. Most are political satire, but one is actually a light-hearted take on my time in Bulgaria working as a real-life Lil Bo’ Peep (aka a farm hand on a goat farm).  I worked with an artist in California named Celia Moscote who did a fantastic job turning my musings into reality.