In January 2020 I began a series of paintings in acrylic and collaged newspaper. I started painting again after 20 years (spent illustrating science) because I felt the need to express my concern more personally about the damage humans are doing to the planet and where our culture is heading.  In one series I focus on silhouetted animals cut from a daily headline, visual poems dedicated to the ongoing loss of our biodiversity.  In another series I use deciduous forests and their annual leaf fall, also cut from the daily news.  Layers of subjects tug and interweave.

The solidity and timelessness of stones are the foundation. Stone, the bones of the Earth, have figured in my work for decades. Water and time shape it.  Water, a fluid element, reveals the rock below, and has sculpted the stones.

Forest leaves fall in seasonal cycles of death and renewal, obeying the passage of time and constancy of change.  Leaves may not affect stones or water, but they are the breathing lungs of the Earth. They are where the trees produce our planet’s lifeblood, until the season turns and they fall, drift, and decompose to feed steam creatures and become the soil that will sustain trees of the future.

Like climate change, human news chronicles our impact on our planet. Human development and technology drastically alter the Earth, irrevocably changing the climate. Like water, news rolls over and by us, flashes of content, in many voices, demanding our attention but drifting away. News collects in mats of headlines and minutia, decomposing into history.