Earth Will Be Fine Without Us

I had the incredible opportunity to participate in the 2021 Religion, Spirituality, and the Arts seminar on Noah, the Flood, and the Environmental Imagination. Sponsored by IUPUI Arts & Humanities Institute, the seminar brought together twelve writers, composers, and visual artists to study, discuss, and create.

The story of Noah is one of undoing. Humans have transformed the Earth generation after generation and like proud children, we usually focus on the beauty of where our desire has led: advances in medicine, buildings that sweep the sky, global communication. It is so much harder to acknowledge the downside – pollution, greed, war, noise, ugliness. As we face a planet damaged, perhaps forever, by human action, the biblical deluge calls on us to consider who is to be saved and who left behind, how suffering takes shape, and what happens after the waters have wreaked their havoc.

I began my encaustic painting with forty 5” X 5” cradled panels. Forty days is a long time to be trapped in a large floating box on the ocean with nothing but animals, time, and destruction. I wanted to capture a little of that monotony in the process. Each panel was painted separately at each phase of the painting so that it was its own story as well as part of a whole.

All of the early stages of Earth relied on the transparent and translucent quality of the wax to create a multi-layered story of human habitation on the planet – a garden green world on top of which humans built basic structures, a foot path, symbols. Then came domination of nature: agriculture, water distribution, brick cities, noisier and dense civilizations, borders & languages, the burning of coal, electricity, over-crowding, globalization, a monotony of products, noise and more noise.

Then: a graying of the painting. Clouds. Denial. And a whitening, as if through a rainstorm, covering up more of the human, and finally a thick coat of titanium white paint – a stillness when there is nothing outside of the waters. There was no going back to how it used to be. It was painful to say goodbye to each layer of paint, and particularly so when the thick overcoat was applied. Will our planet feel similarly when we are gone? Did God have a moment of hesitation when the rains began?