My painting, "What's for Dinner?" in Direct Art Magazine.

Just got my copies of Direct Art Magazine in the mail, with the piece below included, along with my statement about what we do to farmed animals. It's on page 33 if anyone is interested. Click here to read...

"What's For Dinner?" (C) Michelle Waters

Here's my statement about the painting, which appears in the magazine below it: “What’s For Dinner?” plays with the question of what would happen if animals could get back at humans for what we do to them. What if they raised humans for meat? What if animals took our babies away from us so they could use our breast milk for their own species?  It is part of a series of paintings where I use sardonic humor to explore what would happen if the tables were turned and animals had the power instead of us.

We slaughter approximately 10.2 billion land animals for food in the U.S. alone each year. These animals have lives and families that are important to them, yet most of us consume meat and animal products without thinking about who they are eating, and about the suffering that farmed animals endure.

With over 7 billion humans on the planet, the question of how to feed that many humans is a dire one. Most grain is fed to farmed animals while millions of people in third world countries starve, making animal agriculture incredibly inefficient for feeding our ever-growing human population. Not to mention the fact that animal agriculture is the biggest single contributor to global warming, per the United Nations.

"What’s For Dinner?” is my attempt to nudge the viewer to ponder the darker realities of how we get our food, realities which our society mostly sweeps under the rug.