Fulfilling Greed: A Junior Narrative Diptych by Janna Wang (2012)

My diptych portrays a fast spinning diabolo, a type of yo-yo, and a watch buried deep in a mound of coffee. The first picture symbolizes a fast paced, exciting life, but spinning out of control because there's just too much acceleration. In our spontaneous lives, we often pile too much, out of a greed, this hunger for life. This internal insatiability, as beneficial as it may be, cripples life when we are actually trying harder to earn more of it. We attempt at living life to the fullest, but because of this, we end up over fulfilling. I feel like I want everything, to try a bit of this and do a bit of that, but through my stumbling and struggles, I have learned an important lesson this year of balance. On the face of the whirling diablo, the colors blend beautifully, but the entire wheel is soon about to spin out of control, cutting the spiraling off short, parallel to reality. Consequently the effect of greed is losing time. Just like sand trickling out of our palms, nothing can contain time. Living better is essentially living faster, but can we really catch up with time? Regrets, stress, feelings of being lost all come with the strive for living. Avoiding sleep with coffee, I often try to squeeze every last drop out from that clock. The attempts to cover the real time being lost ends in vain, hence the dramatically lit jar of instant coffee piled on a watch in the second photograph. Desperately denying the loss of life and time because of a greed driven, half-crazed mentality is not what should be driving accomplishment. In the blink of an eye, they say, and it is true. We see the beautiful colors spin in a blink of an eye; we see it stop in the same time. Once more and it's years past and only the memories of colors burned into your eyelids left.