Michael, your allegorical paintings present themes of disaster and climate change. While it is an existential threat, is there any hope for humanity, at all?
I suppose my honest answer is I try to be hopeful, but I fear things are going to get a lot worse before they improve. I used to be more optimistic about the situation. I thought we would have made more significant changes by now. But with each passing year, it seems we continue along this path of rampant consumption and excess. And the people profiting from the way things are, have little incentive to change. We are rapidly transforming the planet. Disrupting ecosystems, driving species into extinction, and filling the world with plastic. The list goes on. And it’s said we’ve pumped enough greenhouse gases into the atmosphere by now that, even if we were to pivot and stop all emissions, the climate will continue to grow warmer. Not to be such a downer, but I think it’s becoming frick’n serious. This is why I am so compelled to voice my concerns through my art.
In the end humans will probably manage to muddle through this mess. I just feel it’s unfortunate. We could have spared ourselves, and the planet, a lot of hardship if we had simply made wiser decisions years ago. That being said, today’s young generation gives me hope. They seem to recognize how dire this is becoming. I hope they are able to keep our species from going over a cliff.
Bring on the Dinosaurs! It’s hard not to notice the prevailing dinosaur in your latest body of work. Coupled with a dystopian near-future, these enormous creatures are seen stomping their way through iconic capitalistic symbols, including gas stations…
Yeah, these prehistoric creatures are meant to symbolize the violent forces we’ve unleashed upon the earth. They’re basically a visual representation of an abstract concept like climate change. A century and half of pumping carbon into the atmosphere was bound to have some negative consequences. We’ve effectively liberated these ghosts from the past, and now the dinosaurs are wrecking havoc upon our world. We have manifested this problem upon ourselves.
The Pterodactyls seem to have found a perfect home in the dilapidated Chevron station though…
Well, that’s just a humorous take on my belief that the earth will be fine in the end. In spite of our species ecological impact upon the planet, nature will adapt, and life will go on. Whether or not we are a part of that future is still unclear…
…I’ve always thought plastic dinosaur toys were meta art objects of and by themselves. The dino toys are molded with plastic which comes from oil, which wouldn’t be possible without fossil fuels… and the dinosaurs! I get that same feeling with your paintings, seeing the dinosaurs confront the gas stations…
You know, I hadn’t considered that angle about toy dinosaurs made of plastic. But you’re right. Our society is awash with plastic.
I’m particularly drawn to the painting of the buried car piles, stacked and sort of decomposing ever-so-slowly, well below the earth’s surface. How did they get there?
I think of that painting as a parable about consequences, or the concept of “cause and effect”. Those cars, all clustered together, represent our society’s legacy of fossil fuel consumption. Now, just to be clear, I have nothing against cars. I think they are useful. They allow us to move about, and assist our ability to conduct commerce. It’s just that our current paradigm is not sustainable. So the cars you see here are being subsumed by a radically changed world, a world transformed by our addiction to fossil fuels.
The dinos seem to be thriving in this particular painting…
Yeah, I call the painting “Reversal of Fortune”. Because our actions have freed these dinosaurs from beneath the ground, they now get to cavort around the surface, causing all sorts of environmental havoc, like catastrophic floods and droughts, and turning the planet into a hothouse. Of course the irony is now it’s the cars which are entombed in the earth.
A century and half of pumping carbon into the atmosphere was bound to have some negative consequences.
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