How much can a Single Painting Represent?

To this day, the United States continues to show disunity. But is it bad to not all be united? If we were all united then how would we express our personal opinions, or will our personal opinions be oppressed? Though we may not be united all the time, it is clear that when we are presented with an obstacle, we are able to come together and fix or clear the obstacle. This is especially true in today’s current issue of Covid 19 that is slowly being disintegrated by the world’s amazing medical field.

Nathaniel Mary Quinn, an artist and the creator of the painting “Mend,” portrays the United States of America into one painting. The painting has a simplistic background with plants in both upper corners of the painting. The plants both seem different due to their leaves having no similarity, on top of the right corner plant having white on its leaves. This forces the viewer to look to the foreground. The foreground is a portrait of a melting pot full of different parts of faces combined to create a new face. This resembles the United States of America due to the United States of America constantly being compared to as a melting pot. In the portrait, there are four main cut outs forming the eyes, nose, mouth, and ears. The painting portrays light connecting with the dark, and becoming unison to form a face. The hodge-podge face is connected to a long, dark neck that goes from thin at the connection to the head to thick as it connects the upper torso. The neck resembles a bond between light and dark as it connects the diverse collage of facial parts to the upper torso. As the neck continues down to the upper torso, the painting becomes lighter, to then being clothed with a vibrant red, orange, yellow, green, and blue collared shirt. However, how does this portrait portray “Mend?”

With a simplistic, one-worded title of this painting it must mean that there are too many words to put in the title that would even come close to describing this artwork, or that the title leaves the audience with many ways to interpret the painting. However, “Mend” is what makes this painting stand out. The simplistic word, “Mend” makes people realize that the painting might infer unity. But with all paintings, the meaning is in the eye of the beholder. In the painting it is easy to say that there is a light and darkness meaning. This is clear due to the neck starting off as dark to becoming lighter as it hits the upper torso. This may mean that when we are united, it almost has a lighter/vibrant outcome. This painting seems to have another meaning that is more clear. That we are all the same, meaning that we are born the same. But, we can branch off from one another. This allows for us to have diverse mindsets that can create new innovations in different fields. If we were all the same, meaning the same mindsets, same personalities, and same attributes, the world would be dull, lack creativity, and obsolete considering the world in which we live in today.

Overall, this painting has taught me that we are all united and that being united allows for us to be who we want to be. And when we are all united, we are able to come together and fix any situation that we are faced with. For example, communities have gotten stronger through the hardships that Covid 19 brought. Even to this day, when people cannot see the unity, people are able to relate with one another on their experiences that they faced during Covid 19, when before they could not. This painting is what today’s world needs to follow. With the growing cases of racial injustices, especially against the Asian community, we must be like the neck, and unite to fix these issues. For unity brings strength and with strength we can “Mend.”