Sun, Tree, Home

We try to escape nature by building an artificial world around us, yet we are making this artificial world out of nature itself. This artwork is about cycles and the relationship of materials. On my website I describe this painting as the relation between our sun, the earth, and what we use of the earth and call "man-made". Sounds a bit vague, right? I'll explain through the symbols on the painting.

The sun provides the light and energy to Earth and without it we wouldn't be here, it is essential to us and in a way has help to build us and all of our fellow earthlings. It takes a beam of light from the sun about 8 minutes to travel to Earth's surface. In the painting you can see the wiggly, swirling vibrations coming down the stairs from the window showing the Sun. After the sunlight reaches the Earth it is "used" by pretty much every living thing, such as a tree. An Oak tree, for example, can live up to around 600 years old. Thats 600 years of sunlight and water. Man will use an Oak tree for construction, essentially harvesting the tree that the Sun and Earth have created. We use trees and other substances natural to Earth to make our creations, such as buildings (trees, rock, sand) roads, and various consumer objects. The straight lined shapes (man-constructed) intertwine and are hard to distinguish from the more organic swirling shapes (natural) in this painting.

We call these objects we construct "man-made", but we are using the material of Earth and Sun to make these objects. So these things are being constructed by man, but not made by man. Just as a society of ants will construct very complicated dwellings out of the Earth around them, we humans also construct very complicated dwellings out of the Earth around us. The complexity and use of these constructions are relative to the one who judges.

There is a quote from Carl Sagan thats sums it up best...“If you want to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first create the universe.”