Sunflower Painting

"Give me any tool and I will create art; give me color and I will paint a Palestine that will never be conquered." Odir. Pause to pronounce his name. It has been echoed by accents from the depths of the world's diversity, by people who have met Odir during his conquest as an Artist. A walk not through glass galleries and magazine archives, weaseled between popular gossip houses and technical institutions, among professing critics and vainglorious peers, but a march before the faces of humanity, before poverty and gluttony, rolled within backpacks of anonymous addictions living under a steel bridge of Portland Oregon, framed within the homes of those who remain that believe in the language of the spirit. From the scripts of inner temple walls of Tazumal, protected by Chalchuapa jungles of Pipil Nation, Odir raised himself, with Maya faith, three thousand years alive, in the continuance of the profession of the scribe. Not the recorder of time, but the creator of time, to profess an eternity that the spirit of people alive today, among the forces of violent temporality and within the hollowness of material certainty, must compel their intellect to believe. It is a continuance of the responsibility immemorial of the Artist, to articulate humanity and progress the ascent of culture to the horizon of truth. It was one faith, one Will that possessed Odir to thrive, to leave the fate of his native land, crossing borders of governance, of propriety, of couth, to command the attention and respect that has transcended culture, race, class, and language. Where does Odir's work remain? - Worthy; framed, protected, understood and valued. His gallery remains in the homes of genuine art critics, people that believe in true Art because between their lives they met Odir and gave time for themselves and the necessity of Art that pierced them. The office of a professor of French in Rabat, Morocco, the home of an over worked retiree without a retirement in Salt Lake City, Utah, the estate of a young heiress in Istanbul, Turkey, the condo of an undisclosed Iranian dissident, the car of a business student studying from Hong Kong, mounted in the studio of a fellow artist as the souvenir of the alive possibility of greatness.