The Silver Arrow Times

Friendship-Hatred by ~freakdearts on deviantART
My first piece for the new year is a piece that, oddly enough, was inspired by an NPR news story [link] at the beginning of last semester... It was last of a series on All Things Considered aired in early August about life in the Gaza strip, no doubt sparked by the Israeli peace talks that started during that time... for some reason it resonated deeply with me and when I heard it I couldn't help but start immediately sketching what came to mind...

As an artist I'm fascinated by the connections that can develop between two people, naturally these are usually romantic in nature but I still feel that a lot can be communicated about the nature of said relationship by facial expression, gesture, and body language... subtle things really but there... but with this piece I wanted to focus more on a relationship of a friendship nature than the romantic sort without being as sentimental as in my other pieces especially a relationship as complicated as the one reported... as such I really wanted to emphasize the links in such a way that would be respectful to the source material and not overly cliche... color plays a very symbolic role in this piece in tandem with typography and imagery; I really wanted to make things clear but in a subtle way that wasn't too sentimental... since this is my first piece of potentially political artwork I've done I wanted it to focus on the people involved more than anything else.

As for the symbolism within the piece I highly recommend you listen to the story [link] since it makes more sense when you do...

As a note of trivia that particular color of orange gold was lifted from this particular movie:[link] which I also highly recommend.

TL;DR listen to this story [link] to get it...