drain brain
36: x 48"
acrylic on canvas
True story:
Words and numbers often popped into his brain
in the wrong order, or with reversed characters,
so his spelling was always very bad.
He trembled when the teacher told him to spell
the word "drain" on the chalkboard,
in front of the whole class.
And, as usual, he messed up,
by scrawling the word "brain" instead.
Then his unsympathetic and impatient teacher
neatly wrote the correct spelling above it.
In her frequently mocking voice,
she read the words "drain brain."
After this she quipped, "Obviously,
God gave you a drain instead of a brain."
The class laughed,
but a ministering spirit
assured that he would overcome
this humiliation someday.
flatten vertically
20" x 38"
acrylic on canvas
The inspiration for
this painting came from my own experiences of constant verbal and
physical abuse during my formative years from school bullies, teachers and
my father. After enduring the abuse, I felt physically cold, the kind
of cold that permeates one’s entire being. Ironically I have
always had a fear of intimacy because I remember seeing women like a
teacher I knew and my mother who seemed to suffer the identical core
coldness that I experienced. To the casual observer, the three
female figures seem like they’re cowering just before encountering
abuse, yet again. While the body language could very well be
attributed to that, it could also be the cold felt after the fact.
Purchase inquiries: nick3paint@gmail.com
My artistically gifted little niece's mother was recently told, she `can't write from left to right'. She is 5, newly at school, has been writing from left to right for 2 years and decided to write vertically down the side of her pictures. How creativity can be destroyed by unimaginative, poorly trained teachers is horrifying. How sad it is that mundane minds are the ones who rule the world by sabotaging what we need most of all, if the world is to survive, CREATIVITY. Not everyone can survive the crushing force of conventional education.
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