I have my painting, "Flora Series, No. 6" right now at the "Our Priceless Planet" exhibit being put on by the Gaia Grrrls at the Binghamton, NY, City Hall. The exhibit runs from March 4 through April 29, 2011. Along with the painting goes a statement about the work which I'm posting here so you can get a chance to read it even if you can't make the exhibit:
Sitting on a hill in Norway many years ago I realized most intensely what it meant to be a human on this small planet. As I placed my hands on the cool granite, I could feel the roots of it stretching right to core of the planet. I realized that no grand skyscraper, no massive man-made earthwork, indeed nothing that a human hand could ever make, could ever match the magnitude of the scope, depth and complexity of this planet.
Every day I wake...and look at the world around me. I see the movement of whole continents—only alluded to by the earthquakes that can, in an instant, destroy a city that has taken millions of human hands hundreds of years to build. I see oceans of water sucked into the sky and brought down again in great floods. The strength of nature—rock, water, fire, and air—is greater than anything man will ever create.
Every day I wake...and I also see the amazing flight of a sparrow—weaving its way on unseen zephyrs. The glitter of sunlight on the water—both directed by and, at the same time, refashioning its path through deep gorges. The beauty of a flower-—magnificent in both form and endless variation. Even at the smallest level of detail I see amazing structures and endless variations on a theme.
Whether one looks at the macro scale or the micro one, the wonders of this planet are overwhelming. The billion variations of living beings—self-directed, self-evolving, totally dependent on each other—dance throughout their lives intertwined with each other. We have only the vaguest guess of the complexity within. It is almost beyond the grasp of human imagination to understand just how the health of a single one-celled organism, or the contaminants contained in even a single teaspoon of water, spells out our fate as much as a major hurricane or a hurtling meteor could.
My artwork is a constant exploration of these wonders. The forms and shapes of nature, the colors, the complexity and endless variations are all my inspirations. To see a field of flowers is magnificent, but to get down on your hands and knees and thoroughly explore the astonishing beauty and complexity of just one single petal starts you on the road to a greater understanding of how important it is to stop and think how our actions affect everything on the planet. Even more important is to realize how each action we do can come back on us a hundred-fold.
The intense blue of the sky that hugs our planet, and the endless variations of the blues in single flower, will always be more beautiful and more precious than the deadly glow of a gas flame.
