“Comrades” is about that feeling you get when you’re working collectively for a common purpose, toward a common goal. You’re simultaneously able to multiply yourself, expand your voice and reach beyond what you ever dreamed possible or will ever know about, like ripples in a pond, and at the same time you lose yourself in a larger entity like one bird swooping in perfect unison with your flock, the flock you love and belong to deep in your soul, so that “I” and “we” lose any difference in meaning, like playing your specific notes with your specific instrument in a great orchestra, contributing with all your overflowing heart, both lost in and essential to the sound that’s infinitely more magnficent than anything you could ever do or create alone.
I made this drawing to share and spread that feeling, in the hope that it will resonate with you and reverberate further outward, that it will spark you to recall and/or anticipate this experience with optimism and the knowledge of profound connection with all the many people around the world who are on the same side, trying in all sincerity, near and far, past present and future, known and unknown in a great web of messy but directed energy and effort to wrest a just and caring way of life out of the remnants of this oppressive exploitative ecocidal nightmare — and that it will encourage you to take your part, whatever that may be, in this collective struggle.
Ink, watercolor, acrylic marker, and color pencils on paper, 2022