"The Start of a Dark Period"

(I recommend that you listen to the music form the "Youtube" video on the bottom of this post as you read this) This was originally a drawing I did 15 years ago while in college. It was a homework assignment we had to do usually only 2 colors and nothing more. This is what I came up with. The paper that I had it one, had seen better days and the original was only done in marker. I decided right then and there once I found the original that I had to do it as a painting.

The painting is bigger than the drawing and without the frame measures 24x36, is painted in acrylic paints and as you can tell is only in black and white. The drawing was done in a very dark time in my life when all of my friends were dying around me from AIDS, I had gone from just and HI+ diagnosis myself to on of AIDS and 15 years we knew not nearly what we do today. I was very scared, very angry and literally ready to die myself--only having been HIV+ a year.

The painting as well as the drawing was the three faces of death-- those just finding out they are going to die, those closer to death and maybe even lingering and those dead. Many who saw it originally thought immediately of something from the Holocaust and maybe to some degree it is--My personal Holocaust of living with AIDS. Many people in the years that have seen the drawing either loved the piece or hated it. The paints make the piece MUCH darker/morose than the original but in my mind so be it.

This is also the painting that had a lady acquaintance in my Art Classes worried that I was on the verge of a Mental Collapse. Granted it still is the darkest thing I have ever done in my life but it states where I have been a few times in my life and most recently when I lost "my Ron" to AIDS. It is something I rarely talk about, and I hardly ever share my thoughts on my own future as well--I try only to stay focused on this moment only and nothing more--for after all it is all that we really have.

So for all those innocent lives lost now almost 65 years ago in the Holocaust, for the millions of innocents who have died and are dying of AIDS-- I hope and I pray-----

NEVER AGAIN!

Shalom