The Gulf Stream

A teacher imparts wisdom; a trainer shares every trick; a mother shoves all her love onto her children. But when the waves are flipped, the student assumes he has outsmarted the teacher by learning one new thing. The junior thinks they are sharper than the trainer. The child feels the love of the mother is not enough.

This is a universal friction. And along this line falls nature and human.

Nature is the creator, but humans constantly defy it. Man carries a special element that nature gave to him alone, missing in all other creatures: a "sixth sense." The perception of that presumptive arrogance is what is pinned to this canvas.

A small fisherman's boat is tossed by a rough sea, sharks circling the hull. The man appears fearless, seemingly managing his way through it all. As the waves rise above his head, he inclines his body along with the tilt of the ship to fight his way through. This posture explains the friction. It shows how nature is the ultimate teacher, trainer, mother, and creator, while man attempts to rewrite the script.

The painting speaks directly to the gap between the effortlessness of nature and the performance of man. Nature's effortlessness cannot be seen until you understand the arrogance behind the effortless posture of a human being.

Look closely at what he is actually managing. At the stern, the rudder is completely snapped off. The mast is broken. He has zero mechanical control over his direction. Tied to the deck are a few stalks of sugarcane—the useless remnants of human industry, completely incapable of saving him. Yet, he does not panic. On the far horizon, a faint, tiny silhouette of a ship passes by, entirely oblivious to his existence. That distant ship is the ghost of human civilization, the orchestration that convinces him he is the main character.

Caught between a swarming circle of teeth on one side and a rising wall of water on the other, what gives him the strength to be lethargic?

He is reclining because his presumptive arrogance has convinced him that the universe cannot possibly end with him. He acts like an actor who assumes the script won't allow the protagonist to die, forgetting that the sea does not read the script.

Human effort is a loud, exhausting performance. Nature's power is silent and total. How terrifying will it be for a man to finally realize that the entire crisis—including the very arrogance he used to survive it—was just nature's play all along?