Today I’m devoting my blog space to promoting a project by my dear friend, the artist Paula Billups. I can’t explain it as well as she can, so I’ll just step aside for a moment so you can read her thoughts on the matter.
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I am a painter whose reason for working is to show something of what it means to be human and what it means to live in this world with a compassionate heart and a wide-awake mind.
The current Administration’s recent policy of separating families seeking asylum at our country’s border, and imprisoning the children as well as the separated parents in cages, aroused my compassion, as well as my determination to put my skill to use in service to these disenfranchised families. As is true for any individual, I can only make use of those advantages and gifts I have to draw public attention in the direction I would like to see it go.
I announced I would make thirty paintings in thirty days and sell those paintings on my Etsy page. I donated 100% of the profit from the sale to the Texas Civil Rights Project, an organization which assists disenfranchised people and is in a position to relieve the misery and legal difficulty these refugees face. All thirty paintings sold within hours of being posted.
This book is a collection of those thirty paintings and the descriptions I wrote at the time I made them. They sometimes reflect the joy I felt in the beauty of New England summer days, and sometimes the sadness that came over me while working, because I know that although everyone deserves to feel as free, happy and safe as I did in my daily work, many do not. I am conscious that we, by way of our government, are sometimes the source of that suffering,
It is November 28, 2018. As I type this, the deadline for reuniting these families has long since passed. Yet little children still sleep alone tonight, traumatized and shattered. Heartbroken parents reach arms out to empty air instead of to cradle their little ones. What we have done to them is an atrocity. We know this because we know how we would feel, were we these people. We know it is cruel, because we feel pain at the thought of it.
We are called to use our individual abilities and our voices to counteract institutionalized cruelty, to change our way of doing things in the arena of small moves. We must look around us and see, with all our limitations of being “only one person,” what thing we can do right now, right here.
Offering these paintings was what I could do when it all began, and offering this book is what I can do now to help these members of our human family.
As with the paintings, 100% of the profit from the sale of this book will be donated to the Texas Civil Rights Project.
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If you’re interested in this wonderful art book — which would make an excellent holiday gift, I might add — please visit this link to buy it.
Sappho's Torque 