George Orwell

by Jordan Henderson

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Price

$175

Dimensions

18.000 x 24.000 inches

Title

George Orwell

Artist

Jordan Henderson

Medium

Drawing - Charcoal

Description

A lot of people who hadn’t known George Orwell’s name before became familiar with it sometime between 2020 and 2022.

His actual name was Eric Arthur Blair, with Orwell being the pen name of this English author, essayist, critic, and some say, insider to the world of the rich and powerful.

His two most well known books are Animal Farm (1945), an allegorical novel about a group of domesticated animals who rebel against their human farmer and seek a Utopian world in which all are equal and free (it works out about as well as any Utopian plan put forth by humans) and Nineteen Eighty Four (1949) a dystopian novel of what was then the future, describing a totalitarian and authoritarian society in which the masses are ruled by a Big Brother who is not benevolent at all. (No pseudo relatives in power are, be they Uncle Sam or Uncle Joe.)

Orwell coined phrases such as “newspeak” (love is hate; war is peace), Thought Police, and thought crime, terms that quite accurately reflect the world and experiences under which we live today. (Some opine that Orwell, in 1984, was not writing about the future, but describing what was going on precisely at the time he was writing the novel, but in exaggerated form: in what we consider halycyon days today, there was control, gaslighting, censorship, propaganda, and authoritarianism, but working softly, in the shadows.)

When I first read Nineteen Eighty-Four several years ago, I remember thinking, “Well, yes, this is insightful, but maybe a little far-fetched in its prediction of the direction of our world?” And then 2020 hit, and his work did not seem farfetched at all, but rather, chillingly accurate and, well, prophetic.

I created the charcoal drawing of Orwell because I was intrigued by his face – there is an air of quiet cynicism in that hint of a smile, in the upraising of the eyebrows. As with any historical figure, especially one who is noticed and written about, Orwell himself is a mystery: did he write as a warning to his generations and ones in the future, or was he one of the elite himself, chuckling quietly at his own intelligence and knowledge?

Uploaded

July 16th, 2020

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