"Hope in the Balance"
Clay Monoprint on Pellon
18" x 32"
by Andrew Smith/Visual Realia

The blue and yellow flag is associated with Ukraine and its long struggles with independence, having been flown by soldiers in Kyiv in 1917. The flag was banned under Soviet rule but began appearing again in 1990. It was raised above the Ukrainian Parliament in September of 1991.

In this monoprint, fissures appear in the wheatfields and lands, and the national flower, the sunflower, serves as the sun, both potentially rising and setting. Hope is in the balance.

The colored interruptions in the sky are efforts of the art to speak - echoes of past prints appearing, perhaps in a visually appropriate way: clouds of war. This monoprint is a larger work, using the full clay slab (matrix) used to design the image.

"Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children. This is not a way of life at all in any true sense. Under the clouds of war, it is humanity hanging on a cross of iron."

― Dwight D. Eisenhower