There is a madman in charge of the United States and he has a loyal and armed following. Elsewhere in the world dictators are feeling empowered. The climate emergency is finally playing out the way scientists told us it would years ago. The west coast is burning. Hurricanes are plentiful in the Atlantic. They are being named after Greek letters, something that has only happened once before. There is a global Pandemic caused by a virus with the potential to cause great suffering and even premature death for those who catch it. The world is out of balance with nature. Humans are destroying their only home.
A year ago last summer, somebody who I considered a true dear friend, a sister of sorts, told me she felt we no longer had anything in common now that our children were grown. Our children had been grown for a while and so this confused me. She went on to tell me she did not want to remain close friends because our opinions on things made us too different. When I asked her to give me an example she said “Well you are always saying that certain events are due to climate change.” This felt particularly odd since years ago my husband and I had an extra ticket to hear Al Gore talk at Harvard and we invited her to join us. She was energized after that lecture about the importance of standing up to those who did not believe in the urgency of dealing with climate change. In the months prior to this conversation my husband and I had attended several Extinction Rebellion events and we were both starting to feel panicked about the failure of the western world to address the climate crises. My passion fueled by my concerns about what the future would be for our first grandchild who was about to turn 1. In response to her comment brought up how attribution science had come a long way in the past decade and scientists were indeed confident that climate change had contributed to many of the notable extreme and damaging weather events that have occurred. Once home I would send her articles to support this. Her in laws were (and maybe still are) Trump supporters and although she has always claimed to be a die hard suburban mom liberal, I wonder how much the political turmoil that was building last summer contributed to her deciding she no longer wanted to associate with me as she probably found my comments on this subject overwhelming and too much. It was concerning she no longer felt she could engage in a conversation about this subject. Or for that matter on other topics we disagreed about such as my strong belief that universal health care was the only moral health care for a country to have.
What does any of this have to do with the art I am posting? Not much except when making this image I was thinking about people, like this woman, who turn their back and choose not to listen to those who are saying truths they what they do not want to hear. One of the my last interactions with her was to suggest 2 weeks before the official lockdown that she consider not going in to the middle school where she worked. I am sure she thought I was just being my ridiculous over the top self. But if the entire country had shut down then many many lives would have been saved.
These drawings were done with black walnut ink that I made myself. For years I wondered what the hard tennis ball like seeds that littered the ground around Fresh Pond were. During quarantine I have been doing an herbal CSA and through that I learned about Black Walnut and experimented with making my own ink. I have no idea if it is archival or not. I know the old master’s used black walnut ink, but who knows what they added to their formula in addition to black walnuts. And I am pretty sure their paper was sized with Rabbit Glue. If you buy black walnut ink in the store it is not really black walnut ink because black walnut ink is too acidic. I did add a lot of baking soda to the boiling black walnuts and it frothed all over the place (imagine a vinegar and bakings soda mess but with something that stains…LOL). The dishrag I used to clean that mess up has a beautiful brown tie-dye on it after being washed many times so the color has held up. Anyways as I am short on funds these days it is fun to make my own art supplies. Plus now I know that if it comes to it we can harvest the black walnuts to eat.