Gulf Oil Slick, 2010, 13" x 10", 33cm x 25.5cm, mixed media on canvas (click for a very large size)
no birds, insects, or animals,
nothing but the sludge-brown sea
singing
smacking under the red sun
a rotted post that was once a dock
can we sacrifice our oil-hungry cars, our plastics,
the petroleum
of our lives
for the fish to frolic
the birds diving
while children build buckets of castles
on seafoamed sand?
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We need to rant. We need to get good and furious with ourselves, with manufacturers, with oil companies. These accidents are so huge that they continue to decimate the eden that is the birthright of every creature on earth. When I painted the sludge, I knew it was the oil slick... bubbling up in my vision, so far inland, so many thousands of miles away.
The painting is oils (oil paint is made from pigments mixed with linseed oil, which is from flax seeds), except that brown slick which is acrylic. Crude oil is used in the manufacture of acrylic polymers. While I know that there are many additives for acrylic paints that enable different effects so that it can look like watercolour or oil paints, I don't particularly like them except for underpainting because they dry quickly. This image was composed of leftover oil paint, scraped on with a palette knife, except at the end when I painted in the sun, so of excesses on my palette. The sludge of brown that represents the oil spill devastating the Gulf ocean and the coastlines of Louisiana is a scraping of acrylic paint, a plastic polymer which requires crude oil in its manufacture. It is what it represents, we could say.
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And what if: "What has happened in the Gulf of Mexico is about to open a direct link to the molten core of the planet that we may not be able to control; much as the fallen being above, having become paralyzed by his obsession with the weight of his excessive dreams, now finds himself starring down into the unknown abyss of his own creation-the world may soon find itself nearly powerless before the primeval forces that we have allowed BP to disturb in the unholy name of private-profits over the survivability of this planet." Jim Kirwan, Declaring War on the Universe?
