…from the work in progress.
Happy St. Patrick’s Day 🍀
A happy reacquaintance today with my painting on the ground floor of UBC Hospital, Vancouver, which I painted in 1987 when I was a member of staff of the Health Sciences Centre Hospital as it then was. My visit today brought back so many happy memories of this special place and of all the wonderful, dedicated staff that it was such a privilege to work with for over twenty years. We were family, committed to providing the best care for all of our patients 24/7. I think of them all often and say thank you to each and every one of them.
We must keep Astiyazh Haghighi and her fiancé Amir Mohammad Ahmadi, who were given ten and a half years in jail by the Iranian regime simply for dancing, in our thoughts until the day they are released, together with all the innocent women, men and children already murdered in the streets, those imprisoned and executed and those awaiting execution. We are thinking of them all today and every day.
Wanted for crimes against humanity, the criminal now known as the butcher of Russia, for his merciless massacre of innocent Ukrainian children, men and women, grandparents and parents. Today we learn that many of the over 300 killed in the Mariupol Theatre attack were children and pregnant women sheltering after they had escaped the bombing of the Mariupol Maternity and Children’s Hospital.
This ongoing “Massacre of the Innocents” breaks all of our hearts as it continues unabated, with the fresco by Giotto di Bondoni in the Arena Chapel in Padua as meaningful today as it was when he painted it over nine hundred years ago.
💙💛
From Giotto to Picasso, from Guernica to Mariupol, another Massacre of the Innocents today with the bombing of the Maternity and Children’s Hospital of Mariupol, a crime against humanity that is a despicable atrocity that needs us to bear witness to in any way we know how. My drawing today, which will become a painting in due course, is born from a profound sense of helplessness and heartache that I know is felt by us all. 💙💛
Sixteen beautiful children have been killed in Ukraine according to the Ukraine Minister of Health with heartbreaking images that are hard to see. These sixteen sunflowers painted today are in their memory as we grieve the loss of their young lives together with all those who have lost their lives in these senseless crimes against humanity.
#StandWithUkraine