Acrylic and pastel on cradled birch panel (2023)
Size: w 18″ x h 24″ x d 1.5″
Sudan, the last male northern white rhino, died 19 March 2018. His daughter and granddaughter, Najin and Fatu, are still living, but the subspecies is considered “functionally extinct” as it is no longer viable. I mourn the passing of this great creature with this painting and also the one posted in March (Leaving Eden) https://npaulartworks.com/2023/03/13/leaving-eden-nereids-and-the-northern-white-rhino/
Acrylic, ink, pastel, Japanese paper on cradled birch panel (2023)
Size: w 30″ x h 15″ x d 1.5″
This painting was inspired by the cloudscapes of Georgia O’Keeffe (especially Sky Above Clouds IV, 1965) and Kees van Dongen’s depiction of the ballerinas Anna Pavlova and Ida Rubinstein dancing Cléopâtre (1909). I see it hung paired with Nereids at Nightfall See Fire and Rain (my March 2022 post https://npaulartworks.com/2022/03/31/nereids-in-fire-and-rain/).
Acrylic, ink, Japanese paper on cradled birch panel (2023)
Size: w 24″ x h 12″ x d 1.5″
The Northern White Rhino is on the verge of extinction but efforts to engineer the revival of the species are generating excitement. According to The Guardian (Dec2022): “Scientists who collected semen and eggs from the last living members of the rhino species hope to be able to implant embryos into a cousin of the northern white rhino as part of nascent repopulation efforts which, if successful, would be unprecedented.”
Acrylic, ink, Japanese paper on cradled birch panel (2023)
Size: w 12″ x h 12″ x d 1.5″
Acrylic, ink, pastel on cradled birch panel (2023)
Size: w 12″ x h 9″ x d 1.5″
Acrylic, ink, pastel on birch panel (2022)
Size: w 8″ x h 8″ x d 1.5″
Acrylic, Japanese paper, gold leaf on canvas (2020)
Size: w 28 x h 40 x d 1.75 inches
This piece is also known as Sea Change (Fall Rich and Strange) — June 2020 for the full image. That title still holds, but when I looked at the painting this morning the words came to me. The new title is dark, but perhaps letting out the dark allows the light to come in.
Acrylic and graphite on paper mounted on cradled birch panel (2020)
Size: w 13″ x h 18″ x d 1.5″
Last night I was thinking about the poet Louise Bogan (subject of my PhD thesis a while back). She and her husband renovated an old farmhouse in New York state in 1929. She loved that house. A year and a half later they were driving home from visiting his mother and could see over the horizon that their house was burning. She lost all her manuscripts.
The painting above is about the sun setting. The poem below is about climate change — not about Bogan’s experience — but the image in my head of her house burning, seen through her eyes, was the spark for it.
Bereft
____
When I left, the world was green
There was birdsong
There was life.
____
Left/Nothing
____
I came home to find my house on fire
I was not gone long
I had not gone far.
____
I dream of scorched earth
Acrylic, graphite, gesso on cradled birch panel; triptych (2019)
Size: w 12″ x 16″ (x three panels)
This piece is meant to be viewed horizontally!
Acrylic, graphite, paper on cradled birch panel (2020)
Size: h 20″ x w 16″ x d 1.5″
This image is the third in the triptych Rotation. To see the work as a whole, visit the Lifelines gallery at npaulvisualart.com, the site where I organize my bodies of work.
npaulartworks 