The Power of Imagery in Steve Premo’s “Free the Slave — Slay the Free”

I’ve always held the conviction that “reality” is something akin to the eye of a fly, which has 2000 individual lenses facing all directions.* In some remarkable way the input from all these sources is synthesized in the fly’s brain to form a picture of the reality in which it finds itself.

This, whether my biology is accurate or not, is a metaphor I’ve used to explain why we each need to hear one another’s stories. It is by listening to one another and seeing other points of view that we get a better picture of our shared experience on this planet we call home.

Sometimes, however, viewpoints that diverge from the comfortable stories we’ve told ourselves cause chafing, make us uncomfortable. Many of the voices for these viewpoints have never been heard at all, quenched as they are by the reigning cultural perspective.

In America, the story of “how the West was won” has many heartbreaking incidents that have been seldom been heard, lest they unsettle us. Broken treaties, slaughter of innocents, blatant confiscation for example. One of these is reflected in this Steve Premo painting, “Free the Slave — Slay the Free.”

Even with zero knowledge of the historical moment which Premo is addressing, the painting speaks volumes.