Continuing with the series!

As some of you may know, I have recently begun a series of paintings based on photos I took of trash washed up on a small section of beach in South Vietnam.  One of the purposes in my doing the paintings is to spotlight the disturbing accumulation of waste (most of it plastic) which is polluting our oceans and beaches.

The following image shows the second in this series.  I have not yet finished the piece.

                  

An idea came to me to create the third painting in the series with a background of different colored sand--with black sand.  I took one of my reference photos, played with it in photoshop, and created the following picture:   

                                       

This image was made one day before the occurrence of the devastating Japanese earthquake.  After I looked at the transformed photo, I realized that the flip flop appeared to have been made white with radiation--and the sand seemed dead.  

Here is the painting based on the above photo and it is not yet finished. As I work on this piece, I silently pray for the many thousands of people who have been traumatized by the earthquake, the tsunami and the nuclear disaster.