"The Struggle" Artwork

You can click on this photo to see it much bigger.

Several years ago (don't remember which year), ImageArt (Rochester, NY's annual glbt art exhibit during ImageOut Film Festival every October) rejected the work. I was also unsatisfied with the work and left it in the storage for a while. I happened to ponder about the work and decided to bring it back up. I took the time to redo the work, using color wax crayons and color pencils on the major male figure. I also re-drew the little male figures with a white pencil to make them stand out more. I only used orange, yellow, white, gold, and black color pencils to do the major male figure. I used the color wax crayons to do the pink triangle and the rainbow lines, and the rest of the lines. There are some fabrics on the canvas and I used a back pencil to draw black lines that show them a little bit. Before I even applied the wax crayons and pencils, the work was  made of acrylic paint in gold and black, which you can notice below the male figures and lines. The male figures and the triangle were much darker without the crayons and pencils, which were more challenging to see. When applying the colors and lines, I realized that they really helped the male figures and lines stand out much more. It took me a while to figure out how to solve the problem with challenges, forcing me to fix this and refine this and so forth. So, it is officially done to my best.

This work is certainly clearly related to the gay men's struggle. As you may know, pink triangles were used on Jewish gay male prisoners' shirts in death camps during the Nazi regime as a label for "Gay" and many were executed. The little male figures are pulling, pushing, lifting, and holding the triangle to keep reminding us what really happened. The dark black and gold with stripes and splashes in the background give the mood of darkness or the feeling of oppression. The rainbow lines, of course, represent glbt pride. All in all, this is the message to say gay men's struggle for freedom is carried on from the Holocaust under the Nazi regime and still is today all over the world regardless of where they live.