Print: For the Picking

About the original painting:

Acrylic on Clayboard

14 x 18 inches

About the concept:

It all started with some moldy strawberries…

Millions of years ago, you were hungry, specifically hungry for fruit. You opened the refrigerator. To your disgust, the only fruit (or we should say, “former fruit”) in your fridge were a few moldy strawberries. They were beyond turned. They were beyond the barely visible cirrus cloud of mold that indicates you took one day too long to use them. They had a thick, grayish mound of fluffy mold. The fruit was dry and had been ravished by the hungry fungus that had clearly been more proactive than you.

You were not only overcome with disgust at the imagery but by shame in your own contribution to food waste. Sunken, you stared into the non-recyclable cartridge as you walk to the trash bin. You felt more shame in the fact that you could not recycle the thin plastic and that you did not make a home compost. The trash bin overflowed so you crushed the cartridge containing berries into the bin with your fist.

Those strawberries were eventually transported to a landfill, where plastic, food, chemical waste, electronics, and other items which were properly or improperly disposed of were also transported. Your guilt eventually passed, but the items remained in the landfill. Millennia passed. Your great-grandchildren’s great-grandchildren’s guilt passed and disintegrated as only cognitive dissonance can be destroyed by excuses. Yet, the landfill continued to grow. Matter cannot be destroyed. Sending things to the landfill does not destroy them. Yet, sending things to the landfill can transform them.

Over millions of years, your strawberries passed on their genetic material and the mold passed on its genetic material and the chemical, both radioactive, unstable, and relatively stable all experienced the expanse of entropy. The genetic material and non-living material combined and transmuted. The landfill became a breeding ground for planetary fruit which could not destroy the Earth but did transform it.

The Earth broke apart into smaller bodies, which became vessels for the fruit. The fruit grew so enormous it broke away and took the mountains and seas and deserts. Waterfalls were atop marionberries. Strawberries hosted entire biomes. Radioactive, pink alpacas frolicked beneath cherry trees around a blueberry mini-planet. Your great*10^9-granchild lives inside of a colossal raspberry where some of the few remaining humans have formed a collective.