Watercolor journals of a week

Speed

Meeting daily prompts for #worldwatercolormonth are challenges, and result in mostly smaller, 5 x 7, works, done fairly quickly. I year now to take longer on a piece, so that is stewing, but without answers.

This week's prompts: Casting Shadows, City Life, In the Jungle, Rainy Days, Wet and Dry. All are 5 x 7, 140 lb. Fabriano Artistico cold press paper.

And I added an additional more abstract one of a roadrunner, actually one of my favorite so far. So, after 20 days in July, I've done at least 21 or 2. Some are good, and cheery and others are not. Life.

Casting Shadows

Shadows--I stay away from politics in my blog and painting, for the most part, but anger and alarm at a president being a lap dog for a Russian dictator provoked the Casting Shadows of fascism across America. Art is supposed to matter, and this was inspired by attending the Woody Guthrie festival Saturday...a fighter of fascism indeed.

OKC dawn

City life was difficult because I generally don't like cities, but this version of a card for Susan's nephew fit. 

Heart of Darkness

Jungle took me to who old friends and students know is my favorite novelist and novel, Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness, a copy always in my office: “Going up that river was like traveling back to the beginnings of the world, when vegetation rioted on earth.... An empty stream, a great silence, an impenetrable forest....The ...waterway ran on, deserted, into the gloom....”

Cabin Fever

• Rainy Days was almost a failure, but I thought about cabin fever. I'm cooped up in the city traffic, but not in my cabin, with books, cats, paint, a fire and company. I am always ready for a cabin, good cabin fever. 

Wet and dry--What is wetter and dryer than a good martini. Dorothy Parker and a martini.-“I’d love a martini, two at the most, three I’m under the table, four, I’m under the host” 

When I'm in a concentration camp

Painted two years ago, and owned by step-son-in-law Jake Harms.

You won't be able to visit me, or it will imperil your safety.
You won't be able to say my name, or even mail me.
You will have to disavow you knew me.
You will have to affirm, under oath, that you knew all along, I was a traitor.
You will have to join the majority, goose step and salute with cheers to the dictator. 
You will have to "vote" unanimously to disband schools, to destroy libraries, to repeal the Bill of Rights, to censor all art and music.
It will begin in one of the smallest states, and spread, like cancer, an infection of the mind, of the soul, of humanity, by selfish forces of delusion and division, of intolerance and insecurity, and funded by the hunger for power, not for people.
I will understand, because I will be one of the first to be rounded up and sent behind barbed wire for "national security."
I will admit that I used you, deceived you, led you astray against your wishes.
I will deny that you ever agreed with me, and affirm that you were afraid to disagree with me. 
I will die doing slave labor to build a wall in 100 degree heat in a desert compound where there is a cup of water, and a piece of bread every day.
Or I will be executed for failing to bow down, or salute and repeat the mindless sayings of the "leader," or for trying to escape into the deadly heat of the desert.
I hate pain, and that is my great weakness, but I would rather be shot in the back running away than suffer.
But just know, that my memories of you will sustain me with joy; that I will not judge you for staying away, that I will pray for your survival--knowing that this too shall pass--because souls are eternal--that despots and demagogues are not. 
But I will weep for the loss, for America, and freedoms, and decency, and morality--stolen and fueled  because of a "leader's" manipulation of fear, and hatred, and racism, and violence, and intolerance,  and demagoguery, and ignorance, and extremist religion and politics.
They will come for you next. 

I wish this were a fantasy. 

Facist America

"Fascism should more properly be called corporatism because it is the merger of state and corporate power." 
-- Benito Mussolini
The Supreme Court 5-4 ruling legalizing unlimited spending by donors in politics is the end of democracy in America, and the firm establishment of a fascist state.
From now on, big corporate money will decide every important election, nullifying the individual's vote. The drift toward fascism is not new as elections became more and more expensive, plus the rise of super PACs, and the previous court decision making corporations people. Add to that the complete erosion of personal privacy with the NSA's unlimited spying on everybody. 

"Fascism is a worldwide disease. Its greatest threat tot he United States will come after the war, either in Latin America or within the United States itself."
--Henry Wallace
States are enacting restrictive election laws to deny poor, non-white people  the vote. On the local, state and national levels, corporations rule. Consider Oklahoma with its dominant energy companies getting anything they want, for just one small example. 
And most middle class and upper class white voters sit by and watch, because they don't think it affects them, and because they have jobs with those corporations, and they can vote.
But our votes don't count...only that of the corporations and super rich.
The comparisons to Nazi Germany continue to become more and more evident.

“The first truth is that the liberty of a democracy is not safe if the people tolerate the growth of private power to a point where it becomes stronger than their democratic state itself. That, in its essence, is fascism -- ownership of government by an individual, by a group, or by any other controlling private power.... Among us today a concentration of private power without equal in history is growing.”
― Franklin D. Roosevelt