American Experiment pt.1
oil
50 x 50 x 4 cm
Current location: In Studio
Original artwork price: € 1,170
What if the most powerful nation on Earth was built upon love? That question wouldn't leave me alone — and this is my answer, or at least the beginning of one. The stripes are all there, red and white, bold as ever. But where the stars would be, I put hearts. Fifty of them, give or take, glowing white inside a deep blue field. Not a flag exactly — more like a wish dressed up as one. America has always felt to me like an ongoing experiment, restless and unfinished, magnificent and contradictory. I'm an American living far from home, and I hold that distance like a lens. From here, I see both the fractures and the fire. This painting is not nostalgia and it's not critique — it's a question I keep asking. What would it look like if love were the founding principle, not just the rhetoric? Part one, because I don't think one painting is enough to hold that question.