Submitted by hirbys on Wed, 01/27/2021 - 2:50pm
Roger Kanitz, whose painting “Loving Hearts Soar” graces the cover of ESTHER’s 2021 Yearbook, shares this explanation of how the image came to be.
Last fall, ESTHER board member and banquet committee member Sara Companik approached me about developing a painting for the cover of ESTHER’s 2021 Year Book. Her challenge for me was to create an image to support the selected theme of “Voices for Justice”.
This proved to be a great challenge! I found it hard to convey in a single image all of the great work ESTHER does to promote justice in our community. Symbolically I wanted to interweave the image with the ESTHER logo itself. The final result is entitled “Loving Hearts Soar.”
To me the image illustrates the journey that each of us has the opportunity to take. The foreground of the image conveys the harshness of society today through the rough application of dark colors. But there is a path that we can take to a better world of enlightenment. Indeed, this path has its ups and downs, its twists and turns, all representing the challenges encountered.
Yet on this journey we gradually connect with our true hearts; our empathy for others develops. Our reliance on modern technology, represented by the power lines strung along this path, diminish in importance as we develop our new way to act… to be.
Our hearts expand… like the story of the Grinch … and our transformed spirits take flight! We are transformed into the doves of peace and justice … truly becoming the essence of ESTHER!
So Together … Let’s Soar!
