Five Feet High and Rising

Water.
It has the power to both nurture and destroy, awe and inspire, and damage beyond belief. Necessary for life, civilization sprung up around sources of water throughout the world. Agriculturally important for the minerals it contained, land around the Nile river in Egypt was left vacant during the rainy season to account for the annual flooding that deposited  nutrients into the fertile soil. As a result, the Egyptians were able to grow many crops that otherwise may not have survived. Flooding was acknowledged as a part of nature, a year running its course, and mankind responded accordingly. Today, flood walls are built higher and higher as more damaging storms occur. Rivers are dammed to make way for more developing downstream, depleting the soil that would have once received the same benefits as the area around the Nile. Homes, businesses and schools are built in known flood zones that continue to expand each year. How did we become so intolerant of natures' natural course?
In my prints, I choose to explore the beauty of floods. Humans have wrestled to control the natural world for hundreds of years, from clearing forests to make room for homogenous fields of genetically modified foods to pumping our livestock full of antibiotics and other drugs to subdue disease, fatten faster and keep them sedated. The oceans are rising, soil and water are both heavily polluted, and species are dying off faster than they can be discovered. Immense forests have been cleared, and even the average temperature of the atmosphere is climbing steadily. It seems that the only place that humans have not been able to directly affect is natural disasters. Of course we have the technology and the instruments to predict these disasters, build up our flood walls and board up our windows, but in the grand scheme of things, we are completely helpless. Volcanoes, avalanches, tsunamis, wildfires, hurricanes, snowstorms, tornadoes; nothing can be done to stop them, slow them down or otherwise control them. The power of nature, in her ability to completely and totally render mankind helpless, is what stands out to me in the sea of destruction that is created.

The First Step

I've never really written a blog before, believing that what I had to say wasn't important enough for people to want to read. This held true for exactly three years. At the beginning of this semester, I bought my necessary supplies- paints, canvas, new brushes, and set out to work. But what I hadn't done before was think about what I wanted to say. Isn't that what art is about anyways? Figuring out what you want to say, and then saying it? People don't go out and create great things, beautiful and moving things, and then afterward step back and scratch their head and try to decide what they were getting at. Emotions are conveyed, thoughts experienced, choices made to say this thing or that thing or a multitude of things. We have so many things to say, and so little time to say them.

Since I was a child, I've cared about the environment. From sunup to sundown, I played in the dirt. I played with dinosaurs, and caterpillars, and lizards. Sticks, trucks, rocks, streams and leaves all held hours upon hours of boundless entertainment. Going back to the places I spent my time as a kid, and realizing how drastically they'd changed in the ten years that had passed spoke volumes to me. I know I'm not the only one that has revisited a familiar place to find it not so familiar anymore. So what is to become of these wild places? Neighborhoods and shiny new buildings and parking lots have replaced fields and forests and streams. Smog and acid replace fresh air and water, and in some places, even the soil will never be the same. Reports and studies everywhere point out the dangers of the chemicals we put into our bodies, either intentionally or unintentionally. And at what cost?