War is Peace

by Art West

Canvas Print

Framed Print

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Acrylic Print

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Price

$25,000

Dimensions

52.000 x 52.000 x 1.500 inches

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Title

War is Peace

Artist

Art West

Medium

Painting - Oil On Canvas

Description

NARRATIVE
Light, bright, too bright, bursting with white energy, don't look, yet you do and the Mountain shines in negative against a backdrop of red blackened sky as oil wells burn and a city stands mightily its great skyscrapers just a shadow beyond a great crack in the earth where a wisp of river runs black.

DESCRIPTION
This narrative painting actually began as a vision while driving to the dump one day back in 2004. I described it to a friend and then went to my studio and painted it, a painting of the largest bomb ever set off by the Russians.

I displaced the bomb over Taos Mountain where I lived at the time. The blackened World Trade Center was from a photo I took from the harbor during my years in New York. The oil wells are IRAQ. And the river is the Rio Grande as seen from the bridge that runs over the Taos Gorge.

What most people don't spot is the boat in the very middle sporting an American flag, a swift boat.

I had initially thought of calling the painting "Hope", my hope that this sort of thing won't happen as we are vigilant. But, I went with "War Is Peace" as an homage to George Orwell and his use of the term as a warning in his book 1984.

When my friend saw the painting at the Taos Open he said it was beautiful but that he couldn't look at it. He had been in the Nevada desert as a kid when they were setting off nukes in the sand. His mother had told him not too look.

I believe this may be one of my most powerful paintings to date, certainly one I would not repeat. It held #1 in Yahoo and Google for several years when searching for images of War and Peace, until the military had an exercise called War and Peace and it got demoted ...

The original is available.