Paintings


A pair of paintings that represent my relationship to my home. Returning from Davis during quarantine, I saw how the changes in the climate have affected the environment and lives of those living in the Klamath Siskiyou mountains. The first painting depicts a subdued expressionist representation of a channel of the elk creek. This first painting is the beginning of an exploration into form, space, and movement. I looked intimately at the boulders and the way the channel of water dug into the distance. The bubbling and rolling of the water gliding over moss covered stones, its motion and fluidity set me almost in a trance. That summer, a fire started by downed power lines and extreme weather burned through the town of Happy Camp Ca. My second painting shows a pyrocumulus or fire cloud in the sky above my house, 30 minutes outside of town. I saw the dense cloud of smoke rise, folding in on itself, growing slowly into a monstrous volume of white polluted with brown and yellow. The windy, dry and hot days of summer were then thrown under a blanket of smoke for about a month. This contrast between the deep space of the stream and the frontal space of the pyrocumulus, I felt represented the interaction we have with our environment. We are given the opportunity to live among beauty and to explore it. However, when we tamper with the environment the consequences are impossible to ignore. While fires had come only feet from my house in 2014, this year the Klamath river kept it at a safer distance. However, many of my classmates, educators and friends lost their homes. While the wildfires of 2020 are unprecedented in their intensity, their intrusion into the landscape of California is a threat that has loomed in the skies over my hometown for my whole life. The climate is impossible to ignore when it so often leaves an anxious uncertainty in the air of how to stay calm, how to prepare, and what to do, when it promises to severely change the world around you. Which is why it is hard to hear officials and those in power refuse to acknowledge the importance of protecting our environment. About a quarter of my town is now displaced, staying in hotels, working, and creating fundraisers for each other. I felt responsible to call attention to their struggle and how the people in my community have worked together to help each other through the tragedy and uncertainty that 2020 has brought us.

Guitarist in the Kitchen, 2020