Superstes Print - Limited Edition of 7

In this drawing, I tried to tell the story of a survivor, thus the name "Superstes" which means survivor or survival in Latin. Our Paleolithic ancestors—hundreds of thousands of years ago if it was a day—carried their fire-kits with them everywhere they went, because survival depended on never being without fire or the capacity to kindle it. Fire brought light, safety, warmth, and the fellowship of the human circle. Today, our human survival depends on carrying our stories, whether in a backpack, a Kindle, or in our memory. Stories keep the most endangered parts of us alive. The human fire is always in danger of going out and not coming back, especially in war. We can all say with Albert Camus that “the years we have lived through have killed something in us. And that something is simply the old confidence that humanity had in itself, which led us to believe that we could always elicit human reactions from each other if we spoke in the language of a common humanity.” That language, I would suggest, is the one preserved in great world literature. That language, I am confident, is not a dead language.