Artist Statement
Mourning the Loss is a suite of paintings that began with personal experience and progressed to encompass universal themes of grief and compassion. This series focuses on a single human figure in nature, but seeks to embody humanity's relationship to the Earth itself.
Mourning the Loss is comprised of forty-five paintings in five groups: All That Remains, Contemplation, Railing Against Our Nature, Alone in the Grief, and Intimate Loss. The figure in each painting sits or reclines in a ravaged landscape, often holding the skull of an animal. The figure's body and hands communicate directly, conveying silent dramas of sorrow, tenderness, and passion. The viewer is invited to emotionally enter this world where life seems to hover on the edge of its own demise.
Through the presence of the body and its relationship to the landscape, these paintings explore the most basic of questions: "How can we understand life, both in its finite vulnerability, and in its capacity for empathy and hope?" These paintings offer no simple answer, but show elemental human feelings and suggest that through them we are in touch with a common humanity. The figures are alone, in existential isolation. But in their nakedness they are open to the compassionate embrace of suffering and death that is at the core of our human experience.
These paintings go beyond individual suffering to embrace the world's crisis of environmental degradation. They take the warnings of global ecological emergency and imagine them having progressed beyond the point of no return. The sense of tragedy is inescapable, but so is the sense of responsibility. In these images not only is nature transformed, but humanity is as well. In a sense, these paintings are memorials to a world about to be destroyed, and a reminder of our human share in that loss.
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