Paint and Pixels

Every Single Country In the Whole Wide World

This is a project I started months ago. It is in my living room. I had hoped to have it finished by now, but, as you can see, it is moving quite slowly. I didn't anticipate the complexity and time that it would take to get every single country in the entire world painted on my wall. In fact, while I was painting Africa, I realized that I had left a country out- a weeny of a country (Sierra Leone)- but still a country. And if I never fixed my error, chances are no one would notice, but it bothers me. I keep imaging what significance Sierra Leone is to somebody. There is someone out there that knows nothing other than Sierra Leone, and there is someone who is running for president of Sierra Leone, and there is someone who is dying in Sierra Leone, and someone falling in love in Sierra Leone, etc. The whole painting is frustrating because I am continually having to make judgements about what to include and what to leave out- because inside of the every bay, there is a inlet and inside that inlet there is a peninsula and inside that peninsula there is cove and so on and so on. I imagine that the head of one bristle on my paint brush is like one footprint on the earth, but even then, the bristle is too large to represent how tiny a person is on the earth. And even though the earth makes people seem so tiny, I know the truth about how large a tiny person's life can be, and a single undulation of the line that separates the land from the water can hold so much significance to one itsy bitsy person. The earth is so full of significance that I could never possibly represent all on one wall- but I still want to.

If I ever so happen to complete the painting, I will post a new picture of the completed map. Until then, imagine me laboring over it day and night.