9 Pulses in Pastel

RV-FN-05242026-4


I am thinking through drawing production in pastels the color of greens, on brown paper, made of cotton fiber, which is soft and receptive to this material, earth pigment compressed into a stump with the addition of heat and a binder, to the intimately assured and practiced movements of my hands. There is enough research to state that green calms people, but I observe that people turn away from it after the initial dopamine wears off, that there is an instinctual rejection of too much forest, too much green right now, in this time, because I feel that as a species we have decided that we are something more than nature. Something else tied up into self and the myth of “I”. Something a little more digital and calibrated and a little more artificial. Even as the planetary climate events continue to shape us and our ability to survive, we struggle to name just what this current condition of planetary living is, this place between a condition of contact and a condition of anxiety…so for this series of drawings, I choose green, and begin drawing. Green is our world.

But maybe the most obvious reason for choosing green is because green is ever present where I live in Houston, Texas. The seasons pulse and swell and recede according to the heat and humidity of the Gulf Coast that makes this color sit defiantly everywhere you turn your head. I am presented with the constancy of green in this coastal ecological tableau which is unlike anything I have experienced: part watershed, part jungle, part concrete urban ecology, part industrial infrastructure, part biomass, with its attendant masses of people and the machines they operate to get across the immense distances of this city to make their living. In the new development spread across the city I see green becoming brown as young growth tracts of forest are razed and laid bare and prepared for concrete enclosures, and days later, as the uprooted trees sit in stacks waiting to be picked up on massive trucks and processed, green shoots emerge everywhere and the cycle of succession begins again, shoots becoming insects becoming fungus and watersheds and birds and fish and streams and persistently back to forest. The ancient songs.

The insects here are a living force, a demographic all their own. You are required to contend with them in living here, and the connection is a vibrant one, if you allow it. All species are capable of this recognition and exchange. The cicadas greet the arrival of heat after a long low pressure driven downpour lasting an entire week, buzzing and heaving, and the lushness of my garden with its squash and roses and papaya volunteers and odd plants in earthenware pots I made and fired in my own kiln and the thick forests around our neighborhood remind me of Herzog’s jungle screams. It makes me think of the way that plants, in their long journey from the ultimate humid depths of the ocean, become tendrils and spores, in time trying to reach Mars. Which seems like a radical departure. Let me explain.

I hear his scream as one long green scream echoing out of the oceans and onto land, out of the psychologically unknowable deep past, somewhere registering life’s original rupture. SET theory. Symbiosis. Lynn Margulis’s radical idea against the fantasy of the isolated self. In her thinking, life advances through entanglement, through incorporation, through unstable mergers that create new forms and new structures. New ways of carrying and listening and exchanging and becoming. The only way that green reaches those far shores is through that cadence of rupture and creation, into the cosmos, across the threshold transport of water and salts. Maybe one can imagine a tube, an event tube or an actual tube or a hypothetical linkage of green agency arriving out of the eons, extended from this planet, to its moons, to the asteroids, to the dead radioactive deserts of mars, and the scream would find a home there, a way, a path to taking its metabolic expression of green and the horror of that first rupture the unasked for linkage and terraforming a new world in its own sound, the sound of that original violation.

You can see it in the structures of leaves, the activity of roots and vines, dark apertures and witness holes, forests not as simple plurals of trees but cluster bodies built around pods and spores and nodes, membrane diagrams mapping alongside the memory of emergent cellular intelligence and the strange elegant restraint of partial form, all within a medium of exchange, water.

Here, in this coastal home, there is humidity and marshes. And sargassum bloom that washes up on the shores after storm events, quickly decomposing into hydrogen sulfide gas in the thick heat of the afternoon. And constant mycelial seep creeping under the soil and emerging out of decaying stumps, one fungal clan after another fungal clan, adding their song to the chorus of green. They channel and carry that ever-present chlorophyll signal. In this coastal heat haze.

In these forms, the forms of my drawings, in these movements of my hand tracing green pigment, solely green on this paper, I am finding ecological attunement becoming transmissible through my art, bodily, embodied, vulnerable in green.

It has been argued that Thanatos, the death drive, is present and solely activated through the activities of men on this planet, but I see men and women and third beings in between in the same struggle to attune and connect to the planet’s slow push beyond its shores, to penetrate one final dark passage across moons and asteroids, to experience the slow quiet dust of a new world, to create the jumps and shifts that made evolution possible.

People struggle to be individuals in the forest, but the forest mass pushes and pushes, shaping and shifting the landscape and all of our lives within it. In these forms, these clusters, these tendrils of color linking the architecture of becoming to something nonspecific, something that attunes relationship to arcane green signals that might only chorus under a succession of changing conditions, rather than a singular signal event that defines the individual through the artful and artificial milestones of a life, I find succession and becoming linking together, universe as consciousness knowing itself as green, as energy, as something that feeds itself and knows how to transform, to become another story in that green’s journey out of horror and into something new.

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