This painting is about apathy in the face of environmental destruction. The bulldozer and fires in the background are not too subtle reminders that time is not on our side. The inspiration for this painting was Michelangelo's "Libyan Sybil" on the Sistine Chapel. As time goes by, the more I see how nature is both helped and exploited by humanity. This dialectic is the driving force behind my current body of work. To me, nature is most interesting where it intersects with humanity, probably because I have been intimately involved with the natural world in one form or another for my entire life. It seems I usually have an eye out for the striking examples of the collision between nature and humanity that have become a near daily occurrence in our society.
As a painter and print maker, I enjoy using imaginative juxtapositions to create dynamic tension and thought provoking allusions to these issues, using realism, symbolism, and even a bit of surrealism along the way. By sometimes incorporating fragmentation and disintegration gleaned from previous experiments with disintegrating photo emulsion, I'm also able to speak to nature's fragility, temporality, and the beauty of decay.
Please take a look at Mark's website: www.marklarsonart.com