Before the Oceans Rose
60″ x 60″
Encaustic with LEDs on birchwood panel
2023

Listen
14″x 42″
Encaustic on panel
2008

Summer
14″ x 42”
Encaustic on panel
2008

Winter
14” x 42”
Encaustic with digital transfers on panel
2007

Dolphins Swimming in Warm Waters
60″x 30″
Encaustic with crystals and paper
2009

Hardly a day goes by without some news about global warming. This series of work has been inspired by the predictions of rising sea levels, dramatic weather changes, melting ice caps, and the loss of beloved animals such as the polar bear. The following paintings also represent my first series painted in encaustic, a paint made from beeswax, damar resin and pigment.

The latest painting in this series is Before The Trees Caught Fire, 60″ x 60,” 2023.  It celebrates the Redwood forests of California. In this work , a mother shows her baby the magical beauty of the place.

The next piece is  Before the Oceans Rose, 60″ x 60,” 2023.

I grew up spending my summers at a small cottage on the Chesapeake Bay. I spent my days catching pipefish, painting faces on clams, and building sandcastles. It was my favorite place in the world.
When I had my first child, I brought him to this beach so that he could experience the pitch-black nights full of stars, smell the salt air, and feel the soft sand under his feet.
Thirty years later, that ideal beach exists only in my memory. Houses are falling into the Bay due to sea level rise, and the death of sea grasses in warming waters has caused the pipe fish to die and let jellyfish thrive.
Still, I can close my eyes and remember the sound of the surf and the glow of fireflies at dusk. This painting is a remembrance of those dreams.

Four of the paintings take their names from the seasons: Fall, Winter, Spring and Summer. 

Each painting depicts the ideal weather in the central panel, and the “new normal,” or weather extremes, on the sides. The year I painted Winter, there was almost no snow, in a region that usually had multiple snowfalls.

Surfing is a somewhat humorous look at what we will do when the oceans rise–take up surfing! On the sides of this surfer, two-headed frogs, jellyfish, and wasps float in an all too warm sea. I painted this after reading how rising ocean temperature causes some species to flourish, and others to mutate or die. Clearly, the winners in a too warm ocean will be jellyfish.

Balancing on Ice depicts a fragile human baby on melting ice flow. A polar bear and a walrus sit beside him, and the ends of the painting depict severe weather.

Listen asks us to listen to all the planet’s animals, who are reminding us about the nature of global warming. A large figure above the woman throws fireballs, representing the rising temperature of the planet.

Dolphins Swim in Warm Waters shows dolphins as they struggle with the new reality of rising ocean temperatures.