Dying into Tomorrow

Watercolor on paper, A3

The bad girls of the plant world don’t nearly get the credit they deserve. Gloriously carnivorous, poisonous and/or toxic (to varying degrees) plants and fungi snuck into this watercolor. Datura, bluebells, Venus fly trap, Amanita muscaria, Angel’s trumpet and Caladium to name a few. And a poison dart frog found a corner to watch the drama unfold.

Thanks to the brilliant fortune of several jungle walks in various parts of the world, jungles keep bursting out of my brushes. If there’s one thing the jungle has taught me it’s that the jungle lives on and on because it dies again and again and again. The incessant dying is what makes the jungle so prolific and relentlessly alive.

The seed is where the jungle begins. The portal opens out to the tomorrows that the seeds lure the jungle into. Pomegranate, the mythological symbol of death, fertility and the underworld, speaks to that aspect of the seed which takes it into darkness beneath the soil and births new worlds from within the seed. The jungle seems to ask – Are we even living if we aren’t continually dying? 

A seed is a portal into the worlds waiting to be birthed. Whole new worlds, worlds that sometimes rest on the back of a bug walking over a leaf, or hang by a spider’s thread. All in a day’s world. It’s impossible to break down every element of the painting into neatly articulated sentences, and also counterintuitive to attempt it. The jungle doesn’t offer any explanations, much less neatly packaged ones.

 This painting is an ode to the seeds of renewal that burst open within the carnage of collapse, bringing ever more realms and worlds into existence.

Seeds that have gone deep enough into the dark to become their own desire.

Seeds that see into the future while burrowing into the darkest parts of the present.