Mostly, I learned that art is healing. Art is power; it is something that flows through me. I've learned a lot about listening to what it has to say - because it is not a part of me. It speaks when it wants, and to hear/see what needs to be created takes listening/looking in. That is the guide and I am following blindly and I feel good about it.
I have slowed down my painting process a lot. Starting the summer off with collage was helpful to think of layer and hierarchy, etc. It was also an investigation into found material and well as ideas about excess and degradation as intertwined processes. It also helped me to think about Embodied Landscapes as something that exists as an entity - the body is not different from and cannot be separated/removed from the place/environment that it exists within. Hence why my work is starting to exist in more abstract spaces.
I've developed my process so that I start with a thin Gamsol (solvent) wash that I violently throw and splash on the canvas; it allows for a world to start melting into being. This dripping effect helps me created the degraded environment. The violent nature of this act is purposeful, not only as a means for my own body to release energy, but it reflects the way the environment has been treated, often without thought of as a being and stolen from by the hands of greed. That is how the environment that we live in today was formed and therefore how I allow my space to emerge.
I can then start placing figures in, the people who still occupy this wretched Earth. They barely have form because they are barely here. The scars of their past still remaining & haunting them - and for that I use tools to scrap them away because fuck them. Fuck what has happened, what is happening and what will happen.
I tell the stories of these people. Some of my pieces are more figurative than others, some of the stories are clearer than others as they are already happening. Sea level rise, superstorms, resource depletion, and climate refugees are more figurative because I can source reference photos from the news, current events of climate change. The story is unfolding in front of our eyes. Other pieces that are more abstract perhaps have a more vague sense of time (and event), could be the future, past or present - any option works, and it doesn't really matter. Its the sentiment of degradation, collapse and rebirth that I'm after.
Ultimately the story ends how it started, the environment destroys them. Yet, despite all this chaos, I still find reason to celebrate as I use bright, saturated colors All hope is not lost and humans will continue on within their own experience to the very core - dancing and singing regardless of how bad it gets. I think its important to understand this harmony between seemingly disparate worlds. One time, a teacher asked, "what does it mean to be living on a dying planet?" Part of the answer incorporates beauty. I still find beauty all around me. Beauty as an aesthetic appeal but moreover beauty as a way of life/being. I've come to find that death and decomposition are beautiful processes - aesthetically? perhaps no, but as a means for converting one life to another, passing vitality along? extremely. I find solace in that - knowing that something will come after all this, life will persist, with or without humans. And the landscape - the built and unbuilt cultural landscape will die too. It's death and burial back into the Earth will be alongside its creators - and hey, maybe its better that way.