My first gallery show was this past month, May 1 through May 31. A gallery space at Galatea Fine Arts in Boston was hung with 20 or so cold wax and oil paintings on cradle board and a few oil and acrylic paintings on canvas. The opening was First Friday; always a busy and fun time at SoWa, Boston. Parking is free, and there are food trucks and restaurants nearby to complete a fun night out.
This was a dream come true for me. Other artists and art collectors talked with me about the process of cold wax and what goes into the thinking behind it. It was especially meaningful to me that one elderly man commented on my statement which began with a quote from Rachel Carson:
Earth Unknown
“We stand now where two roads diverge. But unlike the roads in Robert Frost’s familiar poem, they are not equally fair. The road we have long been traveling is deceptively easy, a smooth superhighway on which we progress with great speed, but at its end lies disaster. The other fork of the road — the one less traveled by — offers our last, our only chance to reach a destination that assures the preservation of the earth.”
― Rachel Carson, Silent Spring
Rachel Carson, the environmental scientist, published these words in 1962. Now, over fifty years later, climate change has become the leading problem of our time, and yet we struggle to stay on the “road less traveled by”.
I have always been attuned to nature and the environmental movement of the 70s, when I was in college, it made quite an impression on me.
These paintings, though intended to be non-representational or abstracted landscapes, resemble a dystopian view of our future, our earth unknown.
