Two views of pain and sorrow..........

There are things in this world that defy explanation. Sometimes its family, sometimes it's emotion, and sometimes it is that feeling that although you were not directly involved you understand the pain and sorrow just by looking at a picture or sculpture. I try not to envy, and yet there are people, sculptors to be specific that I am in awe at what they can accomplish with just a simple stroke of a brush, or nick of the chisel.

There were two events on this trip that showed the beauty, the pain, the sorrow of mankind.


The first is a lion - not just a lion - but a
representation of a group of people who
suffered a horrible loss, and we can see
it in the lion's eye. How unbelievably
talented was that sculptor to know how to
shape, how to caress the pain and
sorrow and express that in a simple eye,
an eye that can say so much to the world.

The eye made me cry, as if it were saying

"I did my best, but I have lost."

Swiss guards were hired to protect French King Louis XVI his wife Marie-Antoinette and their children. When the French mobs attacked the Palace more than 700 Swiss officers and soldiers died trying to protect the royals. The Sculpture was created by Danish artist Bertel Thorvaldson.

It is carved out of a sand stone cliff above the city center of Lucerne, Switzerland.

Dachau Concentration camp Germany

The second sculpture is much more moving, much more of the pain and suffering of man. And yet our eyes are drawn to the simplicity of the sculpture, at first it seems a simple twist of metal, then our brains absorb the shapes and we begin to see the depth of human suffering and pain. We are at first repulsed and our hearts reject what our eyes are seeing, but the brain insists - LOOK, FEEL, REJECT, ACCEPT, REMEMBER...........