Oil, 24" x 36"
$3000
©2017 Thomas Anderson
My painting, Curación, has been honored by its inclusion in the upcoming Society of Animal Artists' 58th Annual Exhibition in St. Petersburg, Florida, July 28-October 23, 2018. Curación is a prayer for the healing and the awakening of humankind. Watching the perpetually rippling water on a tranquil day at the wetlands is a form of meditation for me. The endless movement, the constantly changing reflections of light and atmosphere, the eons-old interactions between the birds and all the aquatic life that depend on the coastal wetland, remind me, in spite of the deafening noise of our collective egos, of the infinitesimal role humankind plays in Earth’s history.
Humankind is, of course, currently causing the greatest catastrophic change to the planet since the asteroid hit and wiped out almost all life including all existing dinosaurs except for a few species of birds. At some point in the not too distant future, our destructive, climate-altering lifestyles enabled by the burning of fossil fuels will be represented by a thick black line in the layers of geologic time. Will we cause our own extinction? Unless we can pull our collective heads out of our collective asses, I kind of hope so. Certainly we don’t deserve to inherit this planet in our current forms. We are, each and everyone one of us, apes with cars, guns and computers. Until the worst of our monkey minds — hate, war, aggression, childishness, willful ignorance, and worst of all, fear — have been bred out of us, we will continue to make collectively bad choices. I struggle with my monkey mind every day of my life, and I invite everyone to sit down, shut up and listen to your very own thoughts (and no one else's) and see whether it’s some impulsive, irresponsible primitive primate talking or some self-responsible, higher intelligence. Awareness is the only place where change can begin. And we need a new species of aware, self-responsible human being to immediately be born. Otherwise, we’re toast.