Ariel Sharon in a coma becomes art installation

Just got in late last night from a short family vacation in St Augustine. We stopped in a favorite art gallery there and it made me all at once want to paint again. It's been too long and though it may seem I've lost my desire to paint or draw, my passion for the beauty and agony of art is still alive. I used the word "agony" because I believe a work doesn't have to be beautiful to be art. We all have different opinions but the work of an artist develops from deep within.

This article features the very controversial work of Israeli artist Noam Braslavsky.

Ariel Sharon, once one of the Mideast's most controversial leaders, is the subject of an unusual art exhibition presently on display in Tel Aviv.

Israeli artist Noam Braslavsky has created a life-size sculpture of the comatose Sharon lying eyes-open in his hospital bed.

"This exhibition is an installation, not only a sculpture, which activated the viewer to take part in an emotional process. I choose to take Sharon because Sharon is kind of an open nerve in Israeli society, which activated all the spectrum of emotional feelings to what being an Israeli is," Braslavsky said at the exhibition.

...For years Sharon had promoted expansion of the Jewish settlements in the West Bank before making an about-turn to give up Israel's settlements in the Gaza Strip.

After suffering a massive stroke in January 2006, the then-prime minister was put into a medically-induced coma. Doctors later tried without success to rouse him and he has remained unconscious since. Read the rest here.