Process Painting, Hot Weather & Climate Change

"Though that blazing sun does make life possible, I found it difficult to appreciate the searing hot rays..."
Above are examples of "process" paintings I did about two years ago using tempera paints. A process painting is about painting intuitively without plan or design, painting emotions, like expressionism, rich with metaphor. The top one is named "Light Above the Sea." The second box shows the start of a process painting on the left and the quite different final version on the right... It's called "The Black Hole and the Fire and the Rose". As you can see the one on the right is what I use in my banner. It's about transformation from one state to another.

Hot Seattle
A couple of weeks ago we hit some record highs here in the usually temperate, cool gray Northwest... we had 105 degrees heat for 2 days and the rest in the 90's. Not that it's absolute proof, but, I couldn't help but think of climate change, and some of the other unusual weather patterns that are occurring here and there around the globe.

Climate Change
I am definitely one of those that think climate change is real, and not just another "media or liberal conjured" issue as some may still think. Drastic weather changes here and there, huge chunks of polar ice sheering off, permafrost melting (with the threat of large stores of methane being released), glaciers retreating or disappearing, animal species disappearing or moving to areas never seen, etc.,etc... Gloomy stuff. It reminds me of way back when, when the threat of nuclear bombs was acknowledged, everyone was terrified, we practiced drills in school (ha), then eventually we all became used to it, the idea that we could be annilated in a moment, and it became a part of the fabric of our lives, just more threads in the complex modern web. Now I wonder, is the environmental issue, the climate change and all that it could bring, something that we acknowledge and then move on... getting used to the idea that quite suddenly we could hit a tipping point, a point of no return...

All that debating.... Does it really matter whether it's manmade or not? Shouldn't the important thing be what will be live-able for us as a species? What if we could change things? What if everyone did even one small thing?

In that spirit of one small thing, here is a You-Tube video of Greg Cravens "How it All Ends" (Oct 2007) to watch and consider... not all dry, he has a sense of humor, and a little goofy costume too. Greg Cravens started with a You-Tube video called "The Most Terrifying Video You'll Ever See" which has had over 7,200,000 views, but he says this sequel makes the better argument. He says something I have said for a long time... it's not about saving the planet, the planet will get along just fine without us, it's really about saving ourselves...