The Birth of an Idea

Some 25 years ago, as I was professionally involved in an international business I read a management book (forgot both title and author’s name) in which the following statement struck me:
“The statue of Liberty is not prisoner of red-tape, it is held together by red-tape.”
At the time I must have been sufficiently impressed to remember it many years later after I had retired from business and was starting an artistic career in painting. One of my early paintings, which I then sold to an ex-colleague and continuing friend, was titled “The Melting Pot”
and was an allegory on the United States formation and development.
Later on another friend saw the poster I had made from that painting and complained that I should have offered to sell it to him in the first place. At that very time the statement about the statue of Liberty and red-tape came back to my mind and the idea emerged for another portrait of America based on that statement: wrapping the statue in the red stripes (red-tape) of the Star Spangled Banner.
This was about three years ago and I then spent much time thinking about the project. The major difficulty was on how to make a visual distinction between “prisoner” and “held together”. So I started sketching and found out that the best way to express the “held together” was to wrap the red stripes around a broken statue with several visible cracks.

THE MELTING POT - AMERICA 1