Elegy to the Underground Series 2020-2023

Oil Paintings

People aren’t the apex species they think they are. Other creatures-bigger, smaller, slower, faster, older, younger, more powerful-call the shots, make the air, and eat sunlight. Without them, nothing.

-Richard Powers, The Overstory

As the climate crisis deepens and we face mass extinction, possibly to the point of no return, I grieve for our natural world. Climate change jeapordizes our future with more extreme weather patterns, climate refugees, and the destruction of biodiversity and ecosystems. The human species has not only caused massive ecological destruction but we have separated ourselves from nature and have lost our connection with it. The failure to see this wider context lies behind most of our man-made environmental catastrophes. We often fail to understand, value, or even notice the wondrous, vast, slow, interconnected, primordial natural world alongside ours.

While trees above ground are critical for human survival in producing oxygen, in my Elegy to the Underground series, I am particularly drawn to what happens below ground in the recent discoveries about latticed fungi or mycorrhizal networks. Trees are not simply individual entities but part of a much larger, complex system that engages in social behaviors to communicate and respond as an organism through a vast network of roots. Through sharing resources and working together in complex and infinite pathways, alliances, and kinship networks, trees reach enormousness and increase their chances of survival and ours as well. These new discoveries of the hidden life of trees suggest new metaphors for our survival and how we should act to protect our home and our species. My Elegy to the Undergroundwatercolors and oil paintings are a tribute or memorial to trees whose heartbreaking loss I fear and mourn.