50.000 Hughs from Heaven

When a Painting Becomes Too Honest to Exhibit, and Grief Itself Is Mistaken for Bias

 

I didn’t paint 50.000 Hughs from Heaven for a demagogic statement.

I painted it because I couldn’t sleep.

Because the weight of what I was seeing, and what I was feeling, had nowhere else to go. Because sometimes the only language left is color. Rhythm. Repetition. A surface that can absorb what words no longer can.

This painting is part of a series called “Am I in a Truman Show?” a body of work that asks what happens when reality becomes unbearable, but the world around you keeps scrolling. Smiling. Performing. Pretending not to see.

I didn’t create it to take a position. I created it because I couldn’t look away.

 

A Word That Breaks Itself

The title looks like a mistake. 50.000 Hughs from Heaven.

People ask: “Don’t you mean hugs?”

But it isn’t a typo. It’s a rupture.

The word hughs came to me as I imagined myself not as a painter, not as an adult—but as one of those children.

A child in Gaza who had seen too much. Who had watched their world collapse. Who had seen their mother’s body, their father’s, their siblings’.

Who had seen their own.

And I asked: What would that child feel?

Would they want revenge? Would they carry the rage that we adults recycle, generation after generation?

Or, maybe not.

Maybe, from the edge of life, from the final light of their unspoiled humanity, they would still reach out.

Not to strike. But to be held.

And maybe they would try to write a word. A word they hadn’t yet fully learned.

Maybe they would try to write hugs. And maybe they would spell it hughs.

That misspelled word is the soul of the painting.

Not hatred. Not ideology. But a broken, trembling attempt at empathy in the middle of hell.

Each “hugh” on the canvas is a child’s unfinished gesture. A soft refusal to become what destroyed them.

And there are 50,000 of them.

 

A Canvas Made of Silence and Color

The painting is modest in size, 40 x 40 cm, but dense with intent.

It’s filled with half-moon shapes, repeated obsessively in red, green, black, and white.

Some viewers see watermelon slices. That’s no accident.

In Palestinian visual culture, the watermelon has long replaced the banned flag—its colors a quiet defiance.

But I wasn’t painting a flag.

For me, the colors meant something else:

- Red for blood
- Green for land
- Black for mourning
- White for silence

This is not a painting about a nation. It’s about what remains when nations fall apart.

Each crescent is a child cut short. A syllable never completed. A sentence that dies in the throat.

 

The Accusation I Didn’t Expect

While I was painting this work, I reached out to a Palestinian artist I admire deeply.

I asked him how he made sense of what was happening, how he gave it shape. How he carried it.

His answer was brief, and final.

“This is not a conflict,” he said.

“It’s a colonial project. When you call it a conflict, you accept the occupation.”

I felt the wall go up.

He was speaking from inside the loss.

And I was outside it, trying to listen.

I wasn’t looking to steal his language. I wasn’t seeking permission.

I simply didn’t want to reduce his pain into something that could hang on a wall.

So I stepped back.

Not from the painting, but from the politics around it.

I finished the work in silence.

And when it was done, I began submitting it to institutions, curators, and spaces that claim to support “difficult” art.

None said yes.

Some said nothing. Others said it was “too sensitive.”

A few went further: they warned that the painting could be misinterpreted as antisemitic—because it centers Palestinian children and does not explicitly acknowledge the Israeli children killed in October 2023.

Because it mourns one grief, they said, it risks erasing another.

That accusation stunned me.

Not because I don’t understand the layers of trauma on all sides. But because that interpretation erased the very soul of the work.

This painting was not born in ideology.

It was born in grief.

I wasn’t counting bodies.

I wasn’t drawing lines.

I was imagining a child trying to spell hugs, and writing hughs.

I was thinking of a world that no longer knows how to make space for unapproved mourning.

Is it now impossible to weep for one without being forced to justify why you haven’t wept for all?

Have we reached a point where even empathy must be symmetrical, strategic, sanitized?

This painting doesn’t ask anyone to take a side.

It asks only: Can you still see a child as a child, no matter whose war they were born into?

And maybe this refusal, to allow mourning without conditions, is exactly what perpetuates war.

Maybe this inability to grieve without measuring who we’re allowed to grieve for... is what keeps the violence alive.

 

A Painting That Refuses to Rest

50.000 Hughs from Heaven is housed in a red box frame. The canvas floats, never touching the glass.

It hovers, like a question no one wants to answer.

It’s not a product. It’s not for sale.

It wasn’t made to be owned. It was made to be witnessed.

Because 50,000 children deserve more than silence.

More than numbers.

More than neutrality.

 

From the Series: Am I in a Truman Show?

This work belongs to a larger series:

“Am I in a Truman Show?”

A project about the theater of normalcy. The performance of indifference. The spectacle of looking away.

We live in a loop where genocide appears between one scroll and the next.

Where children die and we measure the timing of our outrage.

This painting is not a spectacle.

It’s a break in the script.

 

It Will Be Exhibited… But Not While It Still Hurts

I believe this painting will be exhibited one day.

I’m sure it will hang on a wall and people will look at it without fear.

But that day will come only when these facts are no longer present—only when they’ve calcified into history.

It won’t happen while the bombs are still falling.

It won’t happen while the bodies are still warm.

It won’t happen while the grief is still a living wound.

Only once the dust has settled—once the violence has been archived, footnoted, politicized, will this painting be allowed in the room.

And that, perhaps, is the most painful truth of all.

But I won’t wait for permission.

If grief makes us uncomfortable, it’s doing its job.

So I’ll keep showing it.

Here. Online. In print. In memory.

And when the world is finally ready to face what it already knows, I’ll be here.

 

Artwork Information

Title: 50.000 Hughs from Heaven

Artist: Antonino La Vela

Medium: Oil on canvas

Size: 40 x 40 cm

Year: 2025

Framing: Red frame box with floating suspension 52 x 52 x 7 cm

Inscription: Title and signature on the reverse

Availability: Not for sale… a painting of memory, not a product