My latest painting is Fractured Forest. It’s an abstract landscape of purple trees and branches with organically shaped leaves falling from a geometric canopy. My view on how I see our environment as more and more chemicals and genetics are pushed on the public, mostly without our knowledge.

This is my way of representing our world now with all the GMO’s and pesticides. (GMO stands for genetically modified organism). It’s gotten completely nuts what the big companies like Monsanto which is now owned by Bayer (yes the pesticides people) are getting away with. I worry what we’re all eating and breathing… it’s in everything, you wouldn’t even believe how far is goes… it’s unavoidable. They’re killing the bees and butterflies, I hate it.

I grow our vegetables organically, however being around farms on all sides of us means whatever the farmers are spraying on their crops, then it is likely landing on my crops too. It’s infuriating to see the helicopters and planes flying over spraying who knows what all over the place. I can smell it in the air, no telling what we’re breathing and you cannot escape it.

If you’ve known me long, then you know I’m a life long tree-huger and nature freak. I recycle everything I possibly can, we own a hybrid car, I compost, garden organically and I save seeds – this is important and I’ll talk about that sometime. If you don’t save your seeds, start now.

It’s important to do all we can to save our planet and all the creatures who inhabit it not only for us, but for our children and future generations. All of nature is depending on us to be respectful of Mother Nature and be good stewards of our Earth Home.

I’ll get off my soapbox for now and tell you about my painting of a fractured forest.

When I first started painting this, I was just laying pretty colors down in no real rhyme or reason. I call this intuitive painting because I had no plan or no sketch when I started, I just let the painting tell me what to do and where to lay down the paint. My imagination takes the lead.

I started with the purples, then I added a compliment color a yellow and greenish yellow, chartreuse. The prettiest yellowy green paint I have is metallic ink and that is what I used. While putting the brush to the canvas, I naturally started pulling the paint into leaf shapes without thinking about it.

My style is usually organic shapes in curves and swirls, not straight rigid strokes and that is what I was following. Trees began to form and a curtain of falling leaves. At this point, I was hearing sisters… three sisters. Can you see the shimmer from the metallic inks? Love that.

Thinking of the story for these three sisters I intentionally left one nearly dead (the right larger stump). She had lived a fairly long life but disease from runoff from the nearby industrial ponds had poisoned her enough to weaken her bark and left infection in. Yet she still stands, soaking up the poisons with her roots that still live protecting her sisters from the same fate.

Not happy with the purple leaves taking away from the trees themselves, I cleaned it up and added branches.

The sisters were looking better and I decided to add a different turn to the story. Adding blocks of colors in-between the branches to show off the branches better started to tell me they were the canopy that had been affected by the chemicals, they were no longer organic but now genetically modified. I left the organic shaped leaves to represent tears falling from the trees and Mother Nature.

So there is the story for Fractured Forest. I just need to sign it and varnish it, I’ve already got the next painting planned and started in my mind. I’m ready to move on.