Watercolor on Paper
22″ x 22″ x 1″
The formal, conceptual, technical and emotional relationship urbanites have with nature is fraught with contradictions. These contradictions are the source for my work. There is the obvious visual contrast, but the deeper contradictions raise many questions: It is in our nature to find plants beautiful but our evolution is literally squeezing them out of our environment and won’t this evolution eventually make them obsolete? Will nature’s tenaciousness prevail and how far will the prevailing species need to evolve to “win?” Which plants will thrive around us as the environment struggles? Will the plants that we now consider weeds become our new cultivars? How does the dirt beneath us feed into and contain these dichotomies? In this Anthropocene era what is the role of “novel ecosystems” and how does that effect our idea of conservation?
I draw and paint these bits of our “substitute nature” laboriously in an effort to understand them.
