Thank you so much, it means a lot! This piece was done specifically for Serene Sea as summer is a season of sick, injured and dead dolphins washing up ashore in huge numbers (about 150 reported every month) in the Black Sea, therefore I wanted to highlight this problem. For some reason even when people see a dying creature tangled in nets and/or emaciated right in front of them, they start to blatter about dolphinariums and whatever else as if nets, overfishing and illegal methods of fishing are not an issue at all. I wanted to show directly that this is hell of a problem and needs to be taken seriously before we see the last goodbyes of the Red Book common dolphins, bottlenose dolphins and porpoises of the Black Sea.

The artwork itself is powerful, but together with your little written poem there, really makes it all complete. I wouldn't mind if you made a version where the text is included in the picture, maybe at the top left. I would definitely want to buy a print of it. I love (and highly appreciate) these dark reality checks between all the pretty-ied up pieces in the artworld. It wakes you up, shakes you up more.

I also read these terrible news from JuanSharks on Instagram back in May:

*photos of lots of dead marine wildlife, finning and shit* "The only thing I truly feared about this covid 19 lockdown. I knew Nature would get break from our carbon footprint as a whole, but without rangers and commercial dive operations to stop poachers from entering marine protected areas, some would take advantage of this situation. Devastated to hear about the biggest shark fin seizure in Hong Kong’s history.
(...)
They recovered an astonishing 26 tonnes (equal to about 38,000 sharks), mostly from endangered species, in shipments from Ecuador.

With shelter at home orders imposed across the globe in response to the COVID-19 Pandemic, Nature has indeed been given a brief moment to “breathe” again, but only in some developed nations where many people have largely lost touch with nature. In many developing nations, the situation is quite different and a shocking environmental crisis is unfolding that is threatening to unwind decades of hard-fought conservation wins. This tragedy is evolving out-of-site, lost from the public eye as all media attention is focused on the human impacts of the pandemic.

With many police and ranger patrols ordered to shelter at home, and with parks and marine reserves empty of tourists, the doors have been left wide open for opportunistic poachers to have an open-season on vulnerable and endangered species. To compound matters further, the illicit wildlife traders, the very same perpetrators who are the origins of this pandemic, are more eager than ever to swallow up these illegally obtained ‘goods’. This is resulting in a veritable free-for-all, with poachers setting upon parks and reserves, targeting high value terrestrial and marine species, leading to decades of conservation gains lost in just months of pillaging."

So yeah, I've pretty much lost all hope at this point. Everything that we environmentalists do is never really stopping the extinctions and senseless brutality and greed, we're merely slowing down the process of that ultimate damage. I will continue to do my part, because I wanna try and keep as much alive as possible for as long as possible, but I don't have hope that much life is left in just a few decades more.

Thank you for raising awareness and for such beautiful and poignant art to carry it