Weathered Women: A Series 

This trilogy centers around the theme of beauty and hope in the midst of intense suffering. Each painting depicts a visibly weathered African female, representing those that suffer at the hands of everything that’s wrong with the world we live in. Inferiority, lack of education, robbed childhoods, vulnerability to abuse and mistreatment, helplessness, lack of opportunities, suffering, loss of life, and on and on it goes. All of these pains are well known to those in poverty. 

However, breaking the cycle of poverty is something that we have never managed to accomplish despite all our great achievements across history. Despite the power and affluence we enjoy as a first-world country. But it is within these weathered and broken souls, forged in suffering, that a treasure takes form — a truth that can’t be known except by one who has suffered. 

The path through suffering to this treasure is a long and arduous journey, and it’s this journey that Weathered Women shows through the progression in the individual pieces. The first piece, A Weathered Life, opens the series up with the sun's rising, which then progresses to a clear afternoon blue with A Parched Land, and finally drawing to a sunset close with A Desolate Place. This series isn’t just about the lives of others, though. Each piece came about as a direct result of the weathered journey in my own life and represented the point I was at when painting the piece. 

A Parched Land 

This is the second piece of Weathered Women. 

Again, we see a mother carrying a baby in a sling and looking off into the distance like the first. However, while similar to A Weathered Life, A Parched Land carries a different (yet related) meaning, exploring further the idea of what really makes a land “parched.” 

When we think of Africa, we often think of a hot, parched land where few things grow. We think of horrible diseases, famine, and death. Africa may have all of those things, but we often don’t see how they are the rich and the poor. In this piece, the mother has deep cracks depicting the difficult life she has lived, but they are darker and less obvious. The young baby’s skin isn’t flawless either. It has the occasional bumps here and there that depict the challenges it will have and the remedies that will have a lifelong impact on their lives. 

In the developed world, we are constantly focused on doing instead of being. We take out all the things that bring meaning into our life ― our friends and family, faith and well-being, spirituality, community, nature, culture and the arts. On the other hand, all these things are a priority in many African villages ― not because they make it a priority, but because it is so ingrained in how they live as people that they don’t know life without it. Even though life is hard, they are never in it alone. For them, what one person experiences, so does the community, binding them together in all things. These are the remedies behind the infant’s smoother complexion. 

If we pause to consider the way of life any aboriginal group worldwide had before colonization, we see many similarities between their lifestyle and those in the small African villages. I often wish that the early settlers had had eyes to see the aboriginal communities' vibrancy, sought to learn instead of teaching, and understood instead of judge. 

We have created a world where we can conveniently distract ourselves from feeling. We live independent lives where we avoid the suffering of others. In so doing, we have robbed ourselves of any good that can come out of it. 

In many ways, it is our land that has dried up. This began when we started valuing individual accomplishments instead of teamwork, larger profit margins instead of honest work, wealth instead of family, and success instead of faith. In terms of values, the parched land is often ours, not theirs.