Samba - Sweet Shoes, not a Sweet Painter

So I opened up the book to the reading assignment to find something to blog on, and the very opening picture catches my attention. There is a little child soldier with his hands up in surrender. But then I notice, he has a strange appendage growing out of his hip. At this point I pause, thinking what the heck is going on here?

I decided to read the caption at the bottom in order to be able to determine if the artist was in to some bizarre mutation type stuff or something. As it turns out, Cheri Samba was trying to show that it is an adult hiding behind the boy in a menacing way.

This bothers me. Not because of the meaning of the man, or the situation that the boy is in, but because there is absolutely no way that that hand can be attached to a full sized man. First off, the angle of the wrist suggests that the arm is angled around 20 degrees south of east. Estimating the mans arm to be around 2 feet, this would at best put the mans shoulder near the boys left thigh.

With the shoulder position considered, the man would have to be located right about where the AK-47 is located (by the way if there is such thing as a Gold Ak-47, I want one). With the body position considered, the man would either have to be sitting on the ground, born with no legs, or standing in a 3 foot deep hole in the ground. I am not an accredited Microsoft Paint artist, so bare with my attempt to show the man in actual size.

Perhaps I am looking in to this painting a little too much, but I feel that an artist should either paint the world as defying the laws of physics or sticking to them. Picasso defied the laws, and his paintings looked good. Samba here paints a realistic world, with gravity obeyed, size ration obeyed, color obeyed (neglecting the gold ak), and yet seems to forget how big the average adult human is.

Samba sucks as a painter, but I sure do like the shoes.