Field of broken dreams. The artist's graveyard. Memories of the past. A profoundly unsettling image.
Loss that is found. The sinking ship with smoke that has turned to stone. Memories of the past destruction. The sinking ship has trees growing through it. How long has it been here? An eternity of sadness?
The foreground is littered with canvases. One with the outline of the Little Boy of Warsaw, aka the crucified child. Another with men wearing hats and one with the slight outline of many figures. All reminders of what has been destroyed.
A single stained canvas peeks out into the field of lost dreams and unclear memories.
The one sinking ship, possibly the Saint Louis, with the sinking hopes of the refugees as they were turned away only to be returned to death and loss. Try to imagine being almost free and then being returned to the inferno of death.
A silhouetted figure, ghost like, moves slowly across the littered landscape. Going where? In search of what?
In the far distance another gesturing figure draws out to itself and the adjacent ship on calm waters. Will this ship find a safe haven?
In our turbulent world we are confronted with these questions of loss and stability daily. How do we navigate these troubled waters of modern life? The artist serves as our guide and grand inquisitor.
Although this was painted in 2020, In Search of a Port, is strikingly relevant today.
The ship could be a knocked-out tank in Ukraine.
I see flattened and fleeing figures in a desolate landscape with no prospect of a harvest.
The landlocked juggernaut in the painting has run aground with no hope of finding a port or even the hope of a port.
We are all on board as we see no safe harbor for anyone in the world as it struggles in the grip of tyranny.
We are left with only the hope of healing indicated by the tree growing through the doomed ship.
Sam Bak who has endured the past century’s most hideous tyrannies has given us this hope by his re-framing his experience into countless works of truth and beauty.
Dr. Geoffrey Dunn (special guest writer)
BAK a Day, May 28, 2022
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