ARTIST STATEMENT
Environmental Chaos
Irreversible Change and Invisible Forces:
For a hundred years modern art has questioned the function of art and its relationship to human life. Nature balances between beauty and chaos; art and life depend upon each other constantly interacting. My recent work focused on The Arctic. The titles of the paintings are the names of channels, fjords, cities, and oceans in the Arctic Circle. The Arctic is geographically complex with very complicated weather systems. The once solid sheet of ice has reached an all-time low and has fractured, separating into large icebergs floating as giant sculptures toward the Atlantic Ocean. This is concerning when you consider just one effect. The Greenland ice cap, for example, contains enough water, were it to melt, to raise sea levels globally by around twenty-three feet. That seemed concerning to me and enough so that I spent two years investigating or grappling in the paintings with the possibilities of climate change in the Arctic.
Lost and Endangered Islands:
This series, Lost and Endangered Islands, seeks to address and reveal the complications the planet faces from heated and rising seawater. Climate Change is real; Greenland and Anarctica are melting; the combination of El Niño and the “the Blob" blasted heat across the tropical and southern Pacific bleaching reefs from Kiritimati to Indonesia, and Tanzania on the east coast of Africa. The damaged reefs may not survive or recover. These paintings represent and recognize, islands around the globe that are currently fighting to survive. These are Portraits of small floating lands underwater and just above water.
Fire and Water:
The paintings are not landscapes but transformations of images of fires that polluted, ruined and destroyed beautiful rivers from Canada to Arkansas when oil tankers derailed and exploded. These events were so unbelievable, considering there is no way to put these fires out, and during a one-week period the media reported a train wreck a day. The image of burning trains was etched in my mind. One moment can create a powerful memory.
I started to work, from the memory of these rivers on fire. The fires were photographed from above thus we saw them in aerial perspective. Each painting holds a frozen moment, each canvas is one frame in a sequence, each canvas relates to all the others like a panorama of fires. In painting we can suspend time by holding a single motion or moment on a surface, by painting in sequence we extend that moment with every canvas. Combinations of line, image, and ground enhance a sense of the possibilities of space.
According to Andrew Thurber, a scientist working in the Anarctic, “Artists help people appreciate environments that are out of the reach of the vast majority of the world’s populace”. Art is more than an object.