The Beginning and the End of War, in a Stunning Watercolor Reckoning with Humanity

4 hours ago7 min read3 comments

I was sitting in a small, sunlit café, a cup of tea cooling beside my laptop, when I first saw Alessandro Sanna’s watercolors. The images, a sequence of stunning, fluid panels, seemed to hold a quiet conversation with every person who has ever felt the weight of being human.We are, all of us, a walking contradiction—a species that can compose a Benedictus of such beauty it lifts the soul, and in the same breath, engineer a bomb of such horror it can erase a city. This duality isn't a flaw; it's the very condition of our complex consciousness.I thought of interviews I’ve conducted, with a poet who found words for her grief only after losing her brother to a conflict she couldn't understand, and a former soldier who now tends a community garden, his hands that once held a rifle now coaxing life from the soil. They are two sides of the same human coin.We descended from the trees, these apes with grand ideas, and we have spent our history both kissing the ground with our prayers and scarring it with our trenches. We discovered the intricate dance of mitochondria and the elegant logic of mathematics.We invented love, that most fragile and resilient of bonds, and we invented war, its brutal opposite. This tension is our inheritance, the price we pay for being creatures who can dream of paradise while building hell.And what do we do with this tension? We don’t just endure it. We transform it.We make poems that outlast empires. We paint, as Sanna does, our reckoning with humanity in watercolors that are both ephemeral and eternal.We write psalms to a silence that may or may not be listening. We take the raw materials of our joy and our suffering and we forge something of substance, something of meaning, something that we hope will whisper our story long after we are gone.It is this act of creation, this stubborn insistence on making beauty from the rubble of our own destructive nature, that is our most profound and defining characteristic. It’s the thread I see in every human-interest story, the quiet triumph in an ordinary life.

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#art

#watercolor

#war

#humanity

#consciousness

#creation

#destruction

#philosophy

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