SUGAR TREES

by Mel Ohlinger

Before studying the French Revolution, I believed freedom and liberty were the same thing. I even painted four canvases of birds in flight to symbolize “freedom.” But I realized later that I was wrong.

Freedom is an internal construct. You are free to choose your attitude toward a circumstance, but you are not free to choose the circumstance itself. True freedom lies in your thoughts—what happens inside your mind belongs entirely to you. Anything beyond that exists within an environment that may or may not protect those freedoms. Liberty, on the other hand, is external. Liberty is the condition of a free society, an environment where rights are protected and restraints are limited.

You may be free to think whatever you want, but once you speak those thoughts, they can carry consequences. Liberty is what safeguards your ability to speak without losing your rights. Freedom exists in every person, but liberty must be established and maintained by society.

To confront my own misunderstanding, I took my bird paintings and shot them—declaring that idea of freedom dead. I ripped the canvases from their frames and stitched them together into a new surface, symbolic of reconstruction: just as a government or Magna Carta must be assembled from pieces into something greater. Onto this reworked canvas, I painted new symbols to show how rich life can be when liberties are secured and human freedoms are allowed to flourish.

Freedom is inherent. Liberty is not natural, but once established it makes freedom livable: protecting speech, property, association, and more. I didn’t arrive at this idea alone, but by building on the work of others. It is a theory I found to be true.

Sidenote: It will probably not be a surprise that this painting was developed throughout a messy divorce, haha.