A community painting 250 years in the making.

A live painting created over five hours, to music, where everyone is the artist.

The Declaration of Independence made a promise 250 years ago: that every person is endowed with unalienable rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, and that government exists to protect those rights. That promise is the foundation of the painting I will be live painting at The Gathering on the 4th of July… literally. The full text of the Declaration forms the base layer of this work, buried beneath everything built on top of it.

Encaustic wax has a long memory. It preserves what is placed within it: text, mark, impression — holding it intact beneath every subsequent layer. The Declaration doesn't disappear under the wax. It stays there, the ground everything else stands on, the way it has always been the ground this country was meant to stand on.

Over the course of this evening, the painting will grow in real time to music, in community, mark by mark.

Fingerprints pressed into warm wax.

Words scratched into the surface.

Color dripped and caught by what's already there.

Each person who approaches this canvas leaves something of themselves behind, held permanently in the wax. By the end of the night, the painting will be a record of this moment : everyone who showed up, every mark they made, preserved together.

The community — everyone at The Gathering Party — becomes the final layers. By the end of the night, this painting will hold it all: the founding words, and the people who showed up 250 years later to say they still matter, and then some.

When the piece is complete, it will be auctioned, with all proceeds benefiting ACLU Oregon - ensuring protection of the rights of the Declaration while demanding the democracy upon which our country was built.