RE: TROUBLE ON THE PLANET

[Detail: "Eighth in a Suite of Untoward Occurrences on Monhegan Is., Jamie Wyeth, Farnsworth Museum, Rockland, ME]

I felt a need to get immersed in art.  Given that the natural world seems to be on a short trip to hell.  (The hot place.)

It's already been reported that the Great Barrier Reef is in serious trouble. Now we hear that there are three billion (billion!) fewer birds than there were as recently as 1970.  Insects have declined.  Forests are burning, glaciers melting.  Current trends strongly suggest there will be more plastic in the ocean (by weight) than fish by 2050.  There is increased poaching in Africa.  Habitat is being lost everywhere.  Extinction looms for many species.  Right now, here, in this country–and, sadly, not only here––we have a president whose response to this is scorn.  He doesn't give a damn.

Help!

[Untitled, Carly Huston]

[Jamie Wyeth, Farnsworth Gallery, Rockland, ME]

But lets not go there!


I'll turn instead to stones. Stones are immutable, unlike biologic things.  They wear away in geologic time, not human time.  I love to run my hands over smooth stones.  Circles suggest contemplation, unity.


(Re art by the way:  What you see in art is what you bring to it, emotionally, intellectually.  You have to bear that in mind.)

[Alan Magee, Dowlling Walsh Gallery, Rockland, ME]

[Alan Magee, Dowling Walsh Gallery, Rockland, ME]

(These sea-smoothed stones are paintings, by the way, not photographs.  Huge paintings, in fact.  Yet even when my face was inches away, the stones were still stones, not painted objects.  I'll let them speak for themselves.)

(Aaah.)



But there it is again, the thing that looms underneath the surface, that exists whether we know it or not, and that doesn't go away.

[Jamie Wyeth, Farnsworth Museum, Rockland, ME]

[Alan Magee, Dowling Walsh Gallery, Rockland, ME]

 (Gloom.  Gloom.)



Can we do something?  Should we?  What, exactly?

["Once in Every Man and Nation," Bo Bardett, Dowling Walsh Gallery, Rockland, ME]

(I' can't say what the artist intended with this picture, but as I said before, you see in art what you bring to it.)

["Transitional Space,"  Alexandra Tyng, Dowling Walsh Gallery, Rockland, ME]

Hah!  I remember the lines in Genesis that Ken so disliked: “And God said, Let us make man in our image, after our likeness: and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth.”  He hated "dominion."  What arrogance humans are granted! 

[Untitled, Carly Huston]

Who are we, anyway, to have dominion over everything?  Look what we have done with that power.

[Alexandra Tyng, Dowling Walsh Gallery, Rockland, ME]

(I am at sea.  Disturbing the water.)