By Lori Fusaro

Joe Dillon is a man who lives his life by his convictions. His bright blue eyes spark with passion as he speaks about his paintings and, more important, his causes. His spin art has a conscience. Every aspect of his colorful paintings tells a story.

“I use ordinary peg board as my canvas,” he says. “The holes are a way of counting individuals in the world. There is a theme of population awareness in most of my work and the damage we as a people are doing to our environment.”

He shared one of his favorite pieces: A two foot-by-two foot piece of pegboard painted black. Layers of colorful paint create a magnificent design.

“Just like a black hole, our consumption falls in on itself and creates a vast void of destruction,” he says. He points to several holes and demonstrates how the paint has seeped inside, layer after layer until the hole is almost closed.

Paralyzed early in life, he had the will to rehabilitate himself.  “When I first had my accident, I couldn’t even move my fingers. It changed my life in so many ways,” he shares.

It’s amazing that now, he not only paints, he also designs state-of-the-art wheelchairs for fellow disabled people. His environmental concerns crosses over to his wheelchair design. The chair he sits in powers his spin art machine. He proudly showed how he controls the speed of the machine. And when he gets going one can either stand back or get sprayed with paint. He refuses to be wasteful of resources on any level. He uses recycled paint that has been improperly mixed, thus producing the wrong color - someone else’s mistake is Dillon’s chosen hue.

Another series of paintings close to his heart is his series of two-sided crosses. “The paintings represent the wounded soldiers from the war. Iraqi or American, it doesn’t matter, they all died. And they didn’t need to,” he says.

He describes the way he lines up the paintings on the floor, “like headstones, 24 deep, static on the ground like the blood of the soldiers. No more soldiers. No more killing. Imagine how much good we could do for the environment with the money we’ve spent on war.” It’s exactly these thoughts that led him to The Peace Project.

The Peace Project was launched when Lisa Schultz, founder of TheWhole9.com asked herself “If one person can single-handedly establish World Peace Day, what can an entire creative community do?” She launched an international art competition, inviting fellow artists to create pieces about their vision of peace to help war-torn Sierra Leone. The submissions were overwhelming. More than 700 artists from across the globe were inspired.

“The Peace Project aims to refute the notion that peace is no longer possible in an increasingly contentious world,” Shultz says on her website. “More importantly, we seek to inspire in people the belief that they can make a positive contribution towards achieving universal peace.”

And so Dillon has apparently found a kindred spirit to further his educational outreach. Some of their goals for 2011 include sponsoring the education and welfare of 25 children, getting 1,000 amputees off the ground by providing crutches and wheelchairs, and creating a community development model that can be replicated one community at a time. It may sound like a lofty agenda but amazing things tend to happen when like-minded people work together toward a worthy goal.