When I was a kid I lived close to a beach and we would go there in the summer and collect shells. I remember painting the shells in art class. Just simple pictures of the sea. I was on a beach recently and collected a bunch of shells and it reminded me of being a kid. It also made me think of Aylan Kurdi who drowned last September trying to escape Syria. It made me wonder what beach scenes are being imprinted on the minds of kids these days when I was lucky enough to have idyllic images on mine. It also made me feel so sad for the people risking their lives to continue their lives elsewhere. No issue is black and white and the refugee crisis seems to be going through the media narrative in the same way as every issue. Right now we are in the backlash stage in which the refugees are bad and the media is running with that story to make money. When Aylan Kurdi died we were in the positive hopeful stage and the media ran with that. I wanted to paint this to kind of remember that, outside of the media narrative, these are still individual people with unique and tragic stories and we should really do what we can to help other individual humans in the same way we'd help our neighbour if they had problems. #refugeecrisis #aylankurdi #syrianrefugees #syria #refugeecrisiseurope #helprefugees

When I was a kid I lived close to a beach and we would go there in the summer and collect shells. I remember painting the shells in art class. Just simple pictures of the sea. I was on a beach recently and collected a bunch of shells and it reminded me of being a kid. It also made me think of Aylan Kurdi who drowned last September trying to escape Syria. It made me wonder what beach scenes are being imprinted on the minds of kids these days when I was lucky enough to have idyllic images on mine. It also made me feel so sad for the people risking their lives to continue their lives elsewhere. No issue is black and white and the refugee crisis seems to be going through the media narrative in the same way as every issue. Right now we are in the backlash stage in which the refugees are bad and the media is running with that story to make money. When Aylan Kurdi died we were in the positive hopeful stage and the media ran with that. I wanted to paint this to kind of remember that, outside of the media narrative, these are still individual people with unique and tragic stories and we should really do what we can to help other individual humans in the same way we'd help our neighbour if they had problems. #refugeecrisis #syrianrefugees #syria #refugeecrisiseurope #helprefugees