Just a Cog painting by Tamassia Martins
Acrylic glazing canvas (18 x 24 inches)
In the heart of a massive factory, a small cog tirelessly rotated day and night. Spinning, spinning, and spinning, and doing its part as a tiny cog in a colossal machine. It had always dreamed of becoming more than a little piece in a giant apparatus, to create something of its own. But for this little cog, there was no time for dreaming. Hard at work, busy spinning in the mammoth device, the cog began to lose sight of its dream. Years passed, and the small cog grew old and rusty, making turning harder, but he never stopped rotating. Feeling like another cog in the wheel of life, its dreams faded with time.
The cog spun until one day, a mechanic came to service the machine. Despite all its hard work, the cog was quickly replaced and thrown into a pile of worn-out parts, waiting to be sold as scrap metal. As it lay there, it wondered if this was all meant to do in life. Rummaging through the pile of old parts with bright eyes and wild imagination, a child named James picked it up and examined the cog. James saw its beaten cogs and its rusted nature, but he also saw how sturdy it was. Recognizing the cog’s potential, James used it to build a machine, one that was small but mighty. A machine that entirely resolved around the small cog. The cog began to spin and spin like never before. The cog felt a sense of purpose and fulfillment it had never experienced in all its years in the big machine. It realized that even the smallest pieces could play a significant role in something greater than themselves and it remembered its days in the big machine, his dream had finally become true.
