The Storm is a mixed media piece, mostly made with clay paint. I finished it after experiencing a Derecho at our home, with 95 mile per hour winds that shredded old oak trees, uprooted beloved pines and destroyed many big trees all around us. As I painted, what kept emerging was that I was exploring the moment before the storm, which was of course part of the storm too. It is not too large a leap to consider that life on earth has been a storm in recent years - pandemic, dramatic climate change leading to catastrophic fires and storms, massive displacement and movement of people around the planet, war and open divisiveness. Like other pieces of my art, you will find hidden faces and creatures and an intentional blurring and vagueness of forms that melt into each other. My work is a Rorschach ink blot in progress.
When working on The Storm in February, I noticed that without my intention, several occurrences of The Green Man had manifested in my paintings - one in The Storm and one in Green Walks From The Inside. I decided to research Green Man because I was foggy on the origins of that legend. One of the things that immediately stood out to me was that during the Russian occupation of Crimea in 2014, locals coined the term “Green Men” and “Little Green Men” to describe the masked soldiers wearing unmarked uniforms entering their land. This was Putin’s way of pretending/hiding the fact that they were Russian soldiers, carrying Russian rifles, etc… (Link to read about “Little Green Men” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Little_green_men_(Russo-Ukrainian_War)
There area many avenues to offer support to the Ukrainian people during the invasion of their country, and this article offers mulitiple credible groups who have taken up that cause: https://www.npr.org/2022/02/25/1082992947/ukraine-support-help
One last note is that there have been few Green Women in the history of the Green people as personifications of nature, and one of the Green people in my paintings from this year is androgynous and another is male, and another is female
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