By Kekoa Paki
Hello Reader
As my final project for my life drawing class, I created a piece called The “Peace Maker.” In this blog, I will describe the design process behind this piece.
For the project, we had to research the 8 artists:
- Alice Neel
- Roger Shimomura
- Kathe Kollwitz
- Alberto Giacometti
- Robert Arneson
- Kehinde Wiley
- and Kara Walker
I looked through their works and biographies and 2 things stood out to me:
- The striking way Kathe Kollwitz used dark and muddy compositions to depict human misery caused by war, such as in the piece “Woman with dead Child, 1903”
- How many of the artists used their work to not only discuss political issues relevant to their times but specifically to confront society with suffering it ignores.
“Woman with dead Child, 1903″ by Kathe Kollwitz
After contemplating the legacies of these titans of art history and my own place in the world, I decided it was my time to speak out against the suffering I see around me. Since the start of 2024, I’ve become more aware of how politics influences all of our lives. Through college, I’ve learned about the history of America, including American foreign interventionism. Additionally, I’ve adopted a class-based view of history in which all social change is the result of a battle for control over the means of production. I’m not an expert on Marxist writings by any means, but I think that his ideas might be the only solution to the problems caused by capitalism.
I tell you this so you can understand my perspective on Trump’s actions regarding the Ukraine war. I see them as an oligarch trying to ally himself with another oligarch to make more money and accrue more power regardless of what and who is lost in the process. I am not an expert on the Ukraine war, nor am I intimately familiar with the history of Ukraine, Russia, or even the US. I am a depressed college student.
But I am also an artist. An artist who admires the artists who came before him and wants to continue their legacy. An artist who knows the power art can have to help people. An artist who wants to help people and be remembered for helping people.
Me needing to justify my work to seemingly myself aside, let’s talk about the actual production process of this piece.
Now, I usually like to be meticulous with my work, plotting each and every detail to ensure I’m conveying the message I want to. However, I was sick when I made this piece, so the design process was a bit more off the cuff than my process usually is.
It started with me just doodling some thumbnails and looking for reference photos relating to modern politics when I came across this one photo of a Ukrainian man mourning the body of a dead infant.
I found this imagery very powerful and immediately got the idea of a composition where Trump was turning away from these people, leaving them in darkness, symbolizing how he was turning his back on them. Then I found this really good photo of a side view of Trump’s face, and I had all the reference material I needed.
As I said, I was sick while making this piece, so I don’t have as many notes or preparations to show you, but there are 2 things I want to mention:
1.) If you look at the darkness surrounding the Ukrainian man, you may see an odd trapezoidal symbol, this was unintentional. You see, before I applied the charcoal to the paper, I used a grapite pencil to mark how I planned the composition. I used the rule of thirds to divide the piece and drew out where I would place the man and the head. The symbol appears to be the charcoal sticking to erase marks left from when I erased my outline. A simple mistake caused by my inexperience with charcoal. Funny thing is, for whatever reason, I don’t think I would undo it if I could…
2.) There’s a super-secret detail in the piece. Look closely at Trump’s eye; do you see anything? Any sort of symbol? It’s a dollar sign $! It relates to that Marxist-adjacent worldview I told you about earlier. I see Trump as just another member of the owner class, motivated by greed and nothing else.
Anyways, I think that’s it for this blog post. Let me know if you have any thoughts, questions, or critiques on The “Peace Maker,” or any of my other pieces.
Thanks for reading this blog post.
From,
Kekoa Paki
Kekoa Paki Arts 
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