This next section of paintings touch topics often in the news: pipelines, no pipelines, war and peace, drowning, and people without conscience using bad situations for other possibilities. Already noted in the first section is that we live in times of greater peace than we know of in other historic times. There is hope. We can build on that and deal with what we must to detect causes rather than assign blame. This next presentation of paintings will keep that in mind.
Margaret’s attraction to machines and mechanical things led me to make the painting. Her tool kit is better and more fully integrated than mine.
The picture is set in a dark hole or depression as one might expect to find around an extraction site where saturated materials are dug up for the oil in them. These sources of burnable fuel were known to the Canadian First Nations People of the region.
The mechanical construction is intended to give credence to operations in progress. The red sky gives lively contrast to the yellow iron works crane. That is backed up by the Hookers green swipe at the bottom under the iron works. The two undefined lines leave factual activities to the imagination. One of my colleges preferred them as shown. I conceded that it was better as you see it than it would have been in any of my imagination struggles to show it better. One of my sons, dressed in a toga of tablecloth material made in India, posing with the painting, could easily be considered to be an Arabian person posed before an oil rig.
