Art of Warning

Art of Witness

Mary Ciani

I was called to an Art of Warning a decade ago. My work radically changed in subject, medium, and palette as the world changed around us, as glaciers melt, and seas rise, and Harvey swirls over a hot Gulf and slams into Houston. I drew back focus from my usual work – intimate visual metaphors of lives lived in time – to a wider view: the life and death of the planet. Years before I had written a poem, Earth Prayer, and now I honored that memory in my art. I drew 300 greyscale Flood Drawings, and painted in blue or reseda green large Deluge Paintings of water, storm, and flood.

An Art of Witness then appeared as what we once feared now came upon us. The black ichor of oil and the red blood of sacrifice flowed down vertical canvases in later Deluge Paintings, and in 280 Postcards from the Future, small daily drawings on Fabriano watercolor paper – warnings mailed back to us. After Los Angeles burned, Fire Paintings required the hot colors cerise and yellow.

I sought to cut through the noise and lies of pop culture to the heart of the matter: our survival of a petroleum-based civilization – a mirage, a deception – that creates great wealth and comfort, but also melts ice, turbocharges weather, overheats us, burns the earth, clothes it with pollution, and kills the host planet. This is my subject, a subject hard to paint, but anger propels. Always I wish for the reenchantment of art and the ecological perspective that Suzy Gablic wrote about thirty-four years ago.

What I see now. From my studio in Texas, I look out to a view of doves and cardinals, pond and bamboo forest, but see only deluge, oil, blood, and fire.

Deluge, Black Oil, Snowmelt, Shattering Rock, 4’ x 12’ Polyptych of four 4’ x 3’ canvases, Golden paints, 2020-2024