Theinkwell writing challenge, season 2 week 7 - Colors of Peace

Ramon was a young dreamer; his artist's heart allowed him to venture into the plastic arts, his drawings with childish strokes did not fit the taste of most critics. He had hundreds of drawings and had not managed to sell any of them.

Ramon was beginning to despair; he worked in a bank as a messenger, which barely covered his expenses. But Ramon always found time to draw; in his creative process, Ramon released all his frustrations, his drawings were made in larger and larger formats, but they did not lose their childlike aspect, with thick strokes, perhaps clumsy and basic colors, his characters were longilinear with clear corporal disproportion, but the general content of his drawings, was always to transmit a message, sometimes of harmony, conflicts in resolution, hope, peace, in all there was a story.

One day, the drawing material ran out, in his precarious economic situation, he could not afford to choose between eating and keeping his dreams; as he could, he added another job to his already diminished time, this time as a maintenance worker, for a contractor and as a painter of fat brush, by contract.

He was asked to paint the facades of the houses, in a poor, dirty, depressing neighborhood marked by violence. Ramon always suggested choosing some simple color, which was almost never the one proposed by the owners of the houses, he painted one by one, Ramon's enthusiasm grew, as he painted more and more houses, the truth is that every day when he finished painting the facades, Ramon climbed to the top of a hill in front of the neighborhood where he could see the group of houses he had painted.

Ramon, had found the biggest canvas he could paint, the whole profile of a neighborhood at the bottom of a hill, in front of another one separated by a highway.

The evening light outlined the face of a lady who inspired peace, by playing with the colors of the facades, so the naive work of an unknown artist had changed the face of a poor neighborhood, one of those that surround big cities, full of daily stories of simple people, of drama, of violence; but with Ramón's work, something changed in the neighborhood, the attitude of its people also changed.

Without hesitation, Ramón and his children's art, which is underestimated by experts, this time, went very far; they changed what no program or official intervention had ever achieved, with the magic of a little art directly from the soul of an improvised artist, who struggles daily between surviving and transcending.