BEAUTY
&
ATROCITY
What beauty is there in life without tragedy? What love is there without loss? Who knows kindness but not hatred? This is itself a tragedy, that mankind cannot indulge themselves in art without innumerable suffering.
Who built the great palace in Versailles? Who ordered the first stone to be laid on the imperialist Academy? From whence did the Colosseum come, or the Hagia Sophia? Each was credited to architects, lords, and stonemasons; yet they were not its makers. The true creators of this art were the suffering, those wasting away in the African colonial mines, those dying of disease on the spice plantations, those who lived in nations turned into backwater slums for the enjoyment of the colonizer's 'high art'.
There is no art without blood. No fortune without another's loss. The paint is meant to emulate the siren's sea from Odysseus, whose fateful journey lead to the divide that singularly is used the demarcate the boundaries of the 'haves' and the 'have-nots' in the (incorrect) modern view of the Western powers, and (to a lesser extent) the view of the young Eastern nations, who followed their conquerors into the system of nation-states but found only more blood awaiting.