To All Veterans ~ We Will Never Forget Your Sacrifice!

Working with Project Compassion, Utah artist, Kaziah Hancock paints portraits of fallen soldiers for their families. Hancock considers every soldier she memorializes as one of her adopted sons and daughters. Hancock and others like her in charities like Project Compassion are what makes America great.

Thank you to all the veterans – men and women – who have fought for our country’s freedoms. Your sacrifices will never be forgotten.

Sacred Modern Art

God’s touch in my email today with two separate messages of sacred modern art. Cameron Smith’s painting is remarkably poignant with his Catholic vision of the Most Sacred Heart of Jesus and the Immaculate Heart of Mary. Please check out Mr. Smith’s beautiful artwork at his website, www.csmithart.com. Such work deserves to be bought, admired, and used in our lives for contemplation as a reminder of God’s love for us.

The next video had me awestruck at the artist’s ambidextrous ability and rhythym without any utensils or materials but sand. Twenty-four year old, Kseniya Simonova is the Ukraine’s 2009 “You’ve Got Talent” winner.

“[Simonva] …draws a series of pictures on an illuminated sand table showing how ordinary people were affected by the German invasion during World War II. Her talent, which admittedly is a strange one, is mesmeric to watch.

The images, projected onto a large screen, moved many in the audience to tears and she won the top prize of about $75,000.

She begins by creating a scene showing a couple, sitting holding hands on a bench under a starry sky, but then warplanes appear and the happy scene is obliterated.

It is replaced by a woman’s face crying, but then a baby arrives and the woman smiles again. Once again war returns and Miss Simonova throws the sand into chaos from which a young woman’s face appears.

She quickly becomes an old widow, her face wrinkled and sad, before the image turns into a monument to an Unknown Soldier.

This outdoor scene becomes framed by a window as if the viewer is looking out on the monument from within a house.

In the final scene, a mother and child appear inside and a man appears standing outside, with his hands pressed against the glass, saying goodbye.

The Great Patriotic War, as it is called in Ukraine , resulted in one in four of the population being killed, with eight to 11 million deaths out of a population of 42 million.

Kseniya Simonova says:

“I find it difficult enough to create art using paper and pencils or paintbrushes, but using sand and fingers is beyond me. The art, especially when the war is used as the subject matter, even brings some audience members to tears. And there’s surely no bigger compliment.”.

Thanks and a tip of the paintbrush to Jean and Marie.