It all started when I saw Al Gore's documentary, "An Inconvenient Truth."

I knew my work would be profoundly affected by the information in that movie - the sad reality that we are irreversibly changing our environment  with greenhouse gasses and pollution.  I knew I had to do something with my paintings and collages to address this environmental assault and express my deep reverence for our planet 
which sustains all life.

As I started working on a painting about global warming, I felt a connection to all the ancient cultures who honored the earth in their art.  Starting with the Venus of Willendorf, a small Neolithic carved figurine which celebrates fertility and abundance, and moving on toward other native and ancestral pieces of art which all seemed to honor the environment, I felt connected to these ancient earth worshippers, and wanted my work to somehow remember and make reference to them.

Also, thinking about how all that we know about these ancient cultures is from the little remnants of their art that lasted - stone carvings or ancient cave paintings or bits of paintings from murals, we try to determine what they meant by their art.  I wondered what someone finding my art a thousand years from now would think - what conclusions would they come to about our current civilization?  It dawned on me that since my art seeks to honor and reflect love and worship of the earth which sustains all life, future viewers who find my art could easily mistakenly assume that our current culture is quite green and sustainable.

So I worked on that assumption - that the pieces would be found in a thousand years, and with no other documentation but the things themselves, I set out to say something about our connection to the earth and our connection to our ancestors.  If in a thousand years, the survivors on this planet assume in the year 2007 we were a Gaia worshipping and Green acting culture, I think that might be a good thing.

I let many influences from ancient cultures (who seemed to have a better connection to nature than us) emerge in the work - there are references to Egyptian, Neolithic, Mayan and Indigenous art, as well as my own more recent ancestors who immigrated from Latvia, Ukraine and Russia.  Bits of natural found objects also appear in the relics and paintings - stones, shells, sticks, bone, and feathers -  bits of the earth herself.

Maybe a thousand years from now the culture will embrace sustainability and live according to rules that don't make a negative imprint on the environment; I truly hope that people will have learned to honor the source of all life that is our planet. 

If not, perhaps there will not be anyone to find my work.