acrylic on canvas, 50 x 100 cm
My latest picture finished last Sunday (Nov 15, 2009). I had the idea to this picture during my trip to Israel in September. One Friday Josh and I visited Yad V’Shem and were invited afterwards to a Shabbat dinner with a family at Jerusalem. Only a few days afterwards we climbed Masada during sunrise. And every time I visit this rock in the desert I hear this voice in my mind saying ‘Masada mustn’t fall again!’ This time this little voice added: ‘As often as they have tried to bring the Jewish people to fall, they never managed to succeed completely. After Masada, after the holocaust and everything in between – We are still here and we are here to stay.’
Thank you for honoring me with your presence and presenting me with a wink of your time. Time is so precious and wears away so fast. Years trickle off, live lines develop – yet do you still know exactly what you did during the last, let’s say, three/ three and a half years? 
So, it is no wonder that I got hooked by two other books in which eyes play a major role – Dante Alighieri’s Divine Comedy and J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter series. Admit it, you never thought you would ever hear these two works mentioned under the same breath. Yet Dante’s paradise, for him a divine or heavenly place that is fortified on all sides against the invasion of evil or unhappiness, is with its 9 spheres quite similar to Rowling’s 9 story, medieval castle with its thick walls, high watchtowers, which is known as a ‘stronghold of ancient magic’, which can only be seen by those few with the ability to wield magic and which would never have come into existence without the same talent. 
If already paradise up to the Fixed Stars and the Empyrean Heaven is not perfect why should our world beneath it, that vibrates around us, be split in good people and Death Eaters, even though I admit such an approach would make the judgment and solution of complex conflicts and the opinion finding process much easier? Yet, we need to keep aware that gold is buried in mud. We all and everything have light and have a Shadow that escorts us like an uninvited guest who came to stay. 
I sallied forth, have the freedom, am a permanent student of myself. After I’ve read a lot – next to other books I’ve read ‘Who am I? And if yes, how many?’, a question I, the pumpkin and it’s seeds, can clearly answer with “21” – it was time to write my own story. ‘One King’s Children’, even though it was not planned like that as it is designed to be a political thriller, became another try to get a better understanding of myself and to embrace a cactus. 
Remembering, attention gaining, turning the limelight onto an injustice that needs to be eliminated as fast as possible as it already lasts for way too long is in the end my primary concern here and on this day. So, let me repeat my question from the very beginning – so you still know what you did during the last three, three and a half years, since June 25, 2006? 
Since very recently, since a video message was published, that the Israeli government bought at the high price of the release of 20 convicted criminals before their time, we know that Gilad Shalit has kept hold of the tree of life during all these years. But now in the very latest it is high time to give him as well the opportunity to search for the gold in the world and in himself, to discover himself, to allow him the wealth of an opinion of himself and to enjoy every wink. It is time to rescue another universe. Freedom for Gilad Shalit!
Aviva Victoria Brueckner 