John Cederquist

Art by John Cederquist (aka Johnny CRUNCH)

14.11.2024 00:48 — 👍 17    🔁 1    💬 0    📌 0

This design took shape on 12 March 2011, while I watched my 10-year-old son frolic in the playground just inside Boys' Gate off Central Park West at 100th Street on Manhattan's Upper West Side. While he played in the sunshine, his best friend was somewhere in Tokyo, unaccounted for since the Tohoku earthquake and its ensuing tsunami had rocked Japan the previous day, resulting in a breach of the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Plant, a triple disaster that left an estimated 20,000 people dead. Even at 10, my boy was rattled by the horrific news, knowing too that his bestie had lost his father in the collapse of Tower 2 on 9/11, nine and half years prior, to the very day. Our thoughts were with that boy, his family, and all the people of Japan, and my concerns extended globally, as I was aware that even as I sat there in Central Park, graced beyond fortune, untold gigabecquerels of nuclear offal was irradiating the Pacific Ocean, dispersed far out to sea by some of the world's strongest currents off the Fukushima coast, half a world away. As I watched my child play with others of every color and creed, fretting about his buddy (who survived and evacuated back to Manhattan with his mother), my heart broke open and this design flowed out. I penciled it in my blackbook with tangled emotions: horror and gratitude and some personal headache from a dissolving romantic relationship, then I noodled it into this graceful form, which it took almost on its own. (Artists know what I'm trying to describe.) Family and friends of mine loved it. I copyrighted it and sell teeshirts and other streetwear emblazoned with it, in red and in other bright colors, along with other graphic artwork of mine. "LOVE" (or "Peace in Love") is indeed lovely, and its message is universal... Art by John Cederquist (aka Johnny CRUNCH)

Art by John Cederquist (aka Johnny CRUNCH)

13.11.2024 16:59 — 👍 13    🔁 1    💬 0    📌 0