Dying into Tomorrow
Watercolor on paper, A3
The bad girls of the plant world don’t nearly get the credit they deserve. Several carnivorous, poisonous and/or toxic (to varying degrees) plants, fungi and a poison dart frog found their way into this watercolor. Datura, bluebells, Venus fly trap, Amanita muscaria, Angel’s trumpet and Caladium to name a few. And that poison dart frog in the corner.
After the brilliant fortune of several jungle walks in various parts of the world, jungles keep growing 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 unstoppably alive.
The little seed is where the jungle begins. The portal opens out to the tomorrows that the seeds draw 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. 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 wait inside a seed, worlds that sometimes rest on the back of a bug walking over a leaf, making no bones about it. All in a day’s world. It’s hard 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. But I’m attempting to share some of the sparks of inspiration that led to this.
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.
