Art of Warning

Art of Witness

Mary Ciani

My pen is dipped into the ichor of oil and the blood of the damned.

My work radically changed in subject, medium, and palette as the world changed around us. As ice melted and seas rose, I drew 300 greyscale drawings of Flood, water, and storm, and then made a series of Deluge Paintings in reseda green or blue. But as hellish heat and fire and strange weather with stranger names descended from our overheated skies, I turned to painting not water, but warnings of black oil and blood flowing down vertical canvases. Then there were one-a-day drawings of Postcards from the Future. Each postcard was sent back to you from your future self as a warning of what is to come, each image as dangerous as cryptonite.

This Art of Warning is now also an Art of Witness: what we once feared now comes upon us.

I join others cutting through the noise of pop culture and corrupt leadership to the heart of the matter: our survival of a petroleum-based civilization – a mirage, a deception – that creates great wealth and comfort, but now, we find, is also turbocharging weather, burning the earth, clothing it with pollution, and killing 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 decades ago.

My work moved from an intimate to a wide view: from visual metaphors of our lives lived in time (Vines, I-Thou, Ladders, Map Mountain Moon) to the life and death of the planet. Earth Prayer reveals all that we can lose.

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