A Practice in Islam

Several posts back, I wrote about the Iraq Painting, a painting that involves tallying up the death toll in Iraq according to a September 2006 study produced by Lancet. The number was 650,000 people and I had a difficult time understanding what that meant in lives. What is the impact of this number, 650000? So I started counting my brush strokes and found that I could average about 12000 marks per day.




I reached the 200,000 mark several months ago and haven't worked on the canvas since then. I will be exhibiting the finished piece in January 2008 at High Energy Constructs in Los Angeles. It will be complete by then.

In the meantime, I've taken on a new project and this one is also an exercise in empathy and experience. On August 18, 2007, I began practicing some of the tenets of Islam. I will continue to practice through Ramadan and will end the project at the end of Ramadan. The total number of days I am practicing Islam is 54.5 days, the amount of days it would take me to paint the entire 655,000 marks on the Iraq painting, if I painted 12000 strokes every day.