Think About Our Future

It is clear to me that one of the reasons I create art is to remind all of us that there is beauty in the world. Sadly and too often the events du jour result in the beauty being visible only in the minutia around us, but if we look hard enough it is still there to enjoy. Despite my positive intentions, once in a while I create an image that reflects a negative event that impact us globally. Here are two.

The first is titled White Radiation. You'd have to have your consciousness in a black hole not to guess that this is about the continuing leakage of toxic radiation emanating from Fukushima.

The inspiration for this piece came while working with a white Icelandic poppy that was covered in droplets of dew early in a recent morning. Just trying to make the glittering poppy shine on the screen the way it did in the garden somehow brought out this unsettling expression. The very thought of the radiation continuing unchecked is unsettling, so this works.

The second is one I created two or three months before the ginormous Gulf oil spill, courtesy of BP. Perhaps this was a premonition? (Dr. Leonard Shlain posits in Art and Physics that artists through the centuries have often expressed scientific theories before the scientists themselves posited them.)

It was inspired by shells I had collected on the beach just south of Santa Barbara, an area that itself was covered in oil in the 60s. Even though the oil company responsible cleaned up the beaches as best they could, ever since then globs of oil and tar befoul those once-pristine beaches anyway. Still, every time we walk there, we have to clean our feet or shoes with some other toxic element to get the smelly, gooey tarry stuff off. One can only wonder what it does to the health of wildlife, from the most tiny to the large. Having seen the continuing degradation of our California coast because of the continuing drilling and pumping, I shake my head in deep sadness about the Gulf's future.

The second is titled Think About Our Future. I sure wish that the leaders of governments and big companies would think more about that.