The Cretaceous
The Cretaceous (diptych left) 20”x16” mixed media
The Cretaceous (diptych right) 20”x16” mixed media
One of my most long-lasting sources of fascination and imagination has been evolutionary biology. When I taught science to middle school kids I had each student create a necklace with a bead representing major events and species that originated, in order. The “test” was them reciting that order of events using their bead necklace as a mnemonic. If they could orally tell me most of it they “passed”!
My diptych ‘The Cretaceous’ was created during a spurt of imagining what it was like during early, early Earth years. The Cretaceous diptych features Equisetum (horsetail), a cone (representing the gymnosperms, the non-flowering plants), a flower (flowering plants appeared at that time) and a mothlike insect.
One of my favorite roadside plants, the horsetail, evolved before the appearance of flowering plants, reaching heights of a hundred feet, falling into swamps to become coal. I would pick some to show my students when learning the elements, just so they would not assume the source of silica was their cellphone! I told them they could scrub their dishes with it if they were stranded in the woods without a scrub-brush, as if, lol! Then I showed them a lump of coal and joked that the horsetail/coal could serve to heat the dishwater. They found me entertaining, if nothing else. Horsetail was still around during the Cretaceous, when flowering plants evolved and started to take over. They are dominating the diptych too. The one flower present is vaguely trillium-like because I have no idea what the first flowers looked like. There is a small frog under the flower, looking up at it as if in wonder at this new thing. Frogs existed by then, but it took the extinction of the dinosaurs before they proliferated into the different species we know now. Cones came from the non-flowering plants which were dominant then. Pine cones are surprisingly fun to paint. Lastly, the moth-like insect. Moths came first, and when they were pushed to become daytime fliers they evolved into butterflies. The butterflies then co-evolved with the flowers, as we see today. I tried in this diptych to make the air itself feel ancient, foreign, heavy. There was more oxygen in the atmosphere then, and more heat.
Later, I made a small picture of the same frog looking up at the same flower as if curious. The little frog in this image is bathed in the ancient sunlight as if spotlighted on stage. Earth stage. I also made the waterbird and an iris, even though I don’t know what kind of bird or iris existed then, but the focus of this painting was the weird, heavy atmosphere. One other of this series of imaginings was Sumac and Butterfly. Sumac is simply a favorite plant. I learned from reading the genius Gary Paul Nabhan, in ‘Cultures of Habitat’, that cultures all throughout the Americas have held beliefs that upon death, the soul becomes manifested as a butterfly. Aztec art is full of butterflies. I don’t think I’ll ever look at a butterfly the same again.
