Just finished this moments ago. A must read for all!

A gift and a curse

Which is why I’ve always been a little skeptical of folks who strongly identify with storm troopers 👀

An arch shaped canvas with a soft gradient painted background. Floating in the foreground is a simple geometric shaped home with mountains, arrows and half circled delicately balance on rope of it. Other elements float by its side and above including rainbows, raindrops, fire moons and stars. The piece titled, Weathervane, represents systems of communication and understanding in the wake of climate change.

In the wake of the Eaton Fire, I feel solastalgia. Grief is present and part of it. However, Solastalgia places that grief within the greater context of a warming climate. To articulate this emotion, will help guide our paths forward in shaping a better future going forward.

The feeling is as if you’re mourning a place you never left, and instead, it left you. The once reliable and familiar, is drastically changed and or unrecognizable.

It can be felt in more subtle ways, such as traditionally reliable weather patterns shifting and becoming erratic. And it can also be experienced over night, like in the wake of the Eaton and Palisades Fires, when entire towns were turned to ruins.

Solastalgia refers to one’s sense of loss or mourning in the wake of change to one’s environment or home, specifically as a result of climate driven disaster, industrial extraction or natural disaster.

My work as a painter for the last 15 years has centered around memory and place and the environment, often looking at it through the framework of the term solastalgia. And, I have never felt that word so relevant to my own life until the recent LA fires. 🧵

It actually is very important that you do things that you take pleasure in, regularly. That is part of how you survive the things that feel like they are going to destroy you.

A landscape painting with a sage green and light umber gradient sky, two symmetrical nautilus shells in the foreground, a mountain on the horizon, and a half circle shaped pot with a geometric plant growing out of it in the center. There are held circle moons in the sky in the background. Earthy hues with fluorescent red accents.

“Nautilus” was painted as part of my solo show Petrichor, which explorer the sensorial experience of natural phenomenon through color shape and form, while exploring themes of place, overlapping time and connection.

#art #contemporarypainting #desertsurrealism #petrichor

Image of arch shaped painting with a symmetrical composition, gradient for sky, mountains in background and rainbow in the center. Sage green, clay and umber color pallet.

Ok, going to make an introduction and see who I can connect with here where the skies are sunny! My name is Madeleine. I’m a painter and muralist living in LA. My work is about memory, place and the environment, and our ever changing connection to it. I care about human rights, and the power of art!