Illustration Friday - Empty

Once again, I went through a bit of a process trying to figure out how I wanted to interpret this week's topic for Illustration Friday. I was thinking about empty spaces and places, empty pockets and empty cookie jars, glasses half empty and glasses half full...and as I was struggling to come up with something good, I came across an article on the front page of the New York Times about the devastating starvation in Niger. I read through the article and looked at the heartbreaking pictures of children dying of malnutrition, and it struck me once again that the concept of empty is certainly a very relative one. I wasn't comfortable with trying to focus my illustration directly on the famine in Niger, so I decided to look at how emptiness relates to having much more than we need. When we have so much, we pout when the cookie jar is empty, we stress when we think we don't have enough discretionary income, we worry constantly about being better than others, and then we wonder why we aren't happy. Empty is when we become so full of ourselves, so selfish and egocentric - that we forget what real emptiness is.