A Plea for Mercy

If nature had a voice, it would be crying out to us to have mercy. In all of human history, we have only now started to wonder about how we are effecting our over-all world.

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We may not live to see the results of the stripping away of the things that have supported us through millions of years of evolution, but we may glimpse what it looks like from around the corner. In less than two hundred years, since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, we have witnessed a stunning reduction of biodiversity on this planet. Our planet, the only body we currently know of in the entire universe that has the chemical balance to sustain life, has relatively lately, lost hundreds of thousands of species. Hundreds of thousands of extinct species, which up till then, had an unbroken genetic line that had survived cataclysmic volcano eruptions, meteor impacts, ice ages, viruses and more. Through all that time they had lived long enough to find food, have sex and produce offspring. Yet they were no match for us. In less than two hundred years they were gone.

There is still a lot of beauty left, many wild places remain, but forests can't buy us off on their own volition. They will only remain if we have mercy.

Nature as the Subject

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Some people ask me if there are human figures in my figurative landscape series, Rising Water. I thought "landscape" was a pretty descriptive term already, so I nicely tell them, "no." Even though I do like figure drawing.

I acknowledge there is a subtle feeling of emptiness in my paintings, despite the relative completeness of the compositions. It is a human impulse to want to be included in a beautiful setting. I consider the viewer to be that element in the composition.

The places and views I'm painting have existed a long time before humans were there to witness it, live in it, put allegory to it, and finally maybe destroy it. We call it "Gia" and "Mother Earth", but more specifically, "She" is the conditions that have produced and sustained us. The forests we see today have stood in some form or another for millions of years. And they are an example of what time can do to flora if it's left alone to evoluve. Existing primeval forests give us a view of exactly what our most distant ancestors looked upon. And some is still there for all of us to see.

I want the viewer of my paintings to see nature represented in an eternal, raw way. That is, without human figures hanging around to tell us how to feel about what we see. I am trying to put away the allegory surrounding nature and simply celebrate it with its color. The color schemes in my paintings are personally observed by me from my time out doors. Monet and the transcendental writer Emerson are among some of the firsts who externalized the idea that is is possible for one to see beyond their own immediate concerns to something bigger and more timeless by viewing nature. We are all more cynical since their time before the shocks of WWI and WWII. Still, it's not all bad to occasionally turn part of our minds to the bouquet of life, as well as the dirt were it rises from, and is certain to return. We gather our own meanings and extractions, but really, nature simply is or isn't.