Somebody Teach Me to Care

Someone to Teach Me To Care, 16 x 20, Oil on Canvas, 2016.
Prints society6.com/product/someone-t…

Ok, It’s done. Took longer than I expected it to. Mostly because I kept reworking both faces. So there’s a bit of an artist statement that goes with this piece:

I got sort of hung up on this picture of Misha Collins 38.media.tumblr.com/1d03ab30f1… with his son during AMOK 2014 (I ended learning so much about AMOK during my research period and was blown away, such a wonderful concept). My mind just kept analyzing the image and all the narrative and symbolic potential. I was really attracted to the image of a father teaching his son kindness and empathy. I’m not sure why, as this is not the type of subject matter that grabs my attention in regards of potential art pieces, but I just could not get it out of my mind. From experience, I’ve seen that often times we fail at teaching our kids these simple lessons, out of our own fear and the fallacy that we should “protect” them from truths that are unpleasant, creating adults that are often times apathetic to others suffering.

In this photo (that moved me so much) I saw a parent teaching his child how to be kind, to have empathy while keeping him safe. I loved that and wanted to capture that and expand a little. I wanted the yellow flower and it’s falling petals to be a physical representation of that empathy and compassion being learned and spread to the man in the mid ground.

The title took forever. I’m so bad at titles I could write a book about it. I finally came up with something I felt happy with. Not truly original as I’ve paraphrased a lyric from Being Alive by Sondheim, but I felt it was fitting as the song is about learning (or wanting) to love.

I’m not sure how successful this piece ends up being but I’ve tried.

Oh ,I have found this wonderful piece mrwootton.deviantart.com/art/O… written by that expresses my feelings much more eloquently than I could. It's focus is on fairy tales but I believe their points relate and can be applied here as well. It's such a good read and received a DD so please check it out.