Reflecting back on 'Painting Peace' as Davis Art Center retrospective nears

As you know from past posts, I have painted a Beatles series that will be included in Palettes: Past Present & Pursuits, my retrospective at the Sidney & Berne Davis Art Center that opens on Friday, January 6, 2017. I also participated a couple of years ago in a campaign that coincided with the opening of Yoko Ono Imagine Peace by the Bob Rauschenberg Gallery on the Lee campus at Florida SouthWestern State College (formerly known as Edison State College).

I called the project Painting Peace. It was a collaborative project designed to enable thousands of Southwest Florida residents and visitors to imagine peace in an experiential, artistic way. I took a 9 x 12 foot canvas to various locations around Southwest Florida and invited the public paint peace symbols on it in various shades of blue.

Of course, Imagine was one of John’s most touching songs and the lyrics were inspired in part by Yoko. Back in the 1960s, Ono created so-called “instruction paintings” that were nothing more than textual instructions for imagining scenes or objects that would fill empty frames. One of those conceptual paintings was called Cloud Piece, whose instructions begin “Imagine clouds dripping ….” That thought fragment later inspired Lennon’s 1971 song Imagine, which John recorded with Yoko by his side.

One of Yoko’s more recent projects is called the Imagine Peace Tower. It is a light tower located on Videy Island in Kollafjörður Bay near Reykjavík that soars two and one-half miles into the sky on a clear Icelandic night. Erected by Yoko Ono in 2006-7, it is conjured by 15 searchlights with prisms that act as mirrors, reflecting a column of light vertically into the sky from a 30-foot wide wishing well base. Power for the lights is provided by Iceland’s unique geo-thermal energy grid. It uses approximately 75 kW of power. Written on the tower’s base in 24 languages are the words “Imagine Peace,” an abbreviated slogan that traces its origins to the “War Is Over! If You Want It” billboards that she and husband John Lennon erected in cities around the world during their successful Year of Peace campaign to end the war in Vietnam.

Yoko lights the tower a different times of the year. It goes every night between the anniversary of his birth on October 9 and his death on December 8. It’s also turned on from December 21-31, on February 18 and again between March 20 and 27.

If there’s room in the grand atrium of the Davis Art Center, I plan to bring my Painting Peace canvas. I have lots of surprises in store for the retrospective. So save the date.