Coloured Water

My home city of Winnipeg has coloured water. Throughout our summer of 2013, I have occasionally seen brownish water pouring into my receptacle that I use to fill my coffeemaker. People are upset and want something done - the evening news is showing reactions of various people in the city, including our mayor. Tests are being done for safety, as our fresh water is contaminated with iron and manganese.

Thus go the frequent inconveniences of our own privileged lives...

Yesterday I started Page 13 for The Biggest Family in the World. Paul H. Boge, the author of Charles Mulli's biography Father to the Fatherless and this new children's version, has provided me with hundreds of photos to work from, as I paint the story of Charles Mulli's life. The last one I painted was one of his family in their mansion, sitting at a table set for a feast. The children were being informed that their father was going to sell his businesses and start an orphanage.

Page 13, a pivotal moment in the story, will be a painting of Charles Mulli standing on a hill overlooking a Kenyan slum. He has to find the first two children to bring home as part of his family. The task seems overwhelming! How do you choose? The slum is made up of concrete and mud homes with corrugated metal sheeting for roofs. There is no running water here. There is a trench in the road where garbage and sewage collects. It reminds me a lot of a similar slum that I visited on a tour to Guatemala, where people were literally living in a garbage dump. Their means of existence consisted of sifting through the garbage every day for food and re-usable items. You can imagine the smell and the heaps of garbage with vultures circling overhead....

Below is the photo taken by the book's author, Paul Boge, that I am using as reference for this particular page. I will be doing a more "cleaned up" version. As they read together, I can imagine parents asking their children, "How do you think you would feel if you lived here?"

.

The Biggest Family in the World - a new children's book based on the life of Charles Mulli, planned for publication in 2014. This is a blog chronicling the book's creation from the perspective of the artist.