I am making a series of pictures that have some kind of environmental meaning attached to them. Quite often the work is surrealistic and needs quite a bit of explaining. The work is designed to raise questions, not much in the way of supplying any answers.
The first picture I am putting in an exhibition that is about things that have influenced us at some point in time. The picture is called The Landscape Of Dorian gray.
The framed factories convert sunlight and trees and plants into money that goes up in smoke and changes clean water into dirty water that changes streams of air, water, and land into broken, polluted, rainbows of bright, dark, colors.
When I was a young child, I saw a central Connecticut river valley with a big stream running through the middle of it. The sides of the stream bank were stained bright colors of the rainbow. As the upstream factories discharged their waste into the stream, the height of the polluted water stained the banks of the stream. High dirty water marks. Sometimes it was one color from bank to bank, other times it was a layer of colors, each color’s height on the bank determined by how deep the polluted water discharge was. Just a little, and it was a single band along the bottom of the stream bed. A big deep discharge, brought the height of the color up to the top of the stream bank. Usually it was a combination of colors from how high the discharge rose, what color it was, and how many there were that day. A long, winding, brightly colored linear rainbow, snaking along the ground. A sight I never forgot, though it was a while before I knew what I had seen.
Dorian Gray’s body is the real, physical, virtual world we have built of glass, steel, concrete, and plastic. Powered by electricity, it stands tall, as an ornamental monument to our creativity. Dorian Gray’s portrait is a global picture of the zone of the natural world we live in, growing uglier day by day, as it loses its beauty of biological diversity. As in the story of the Portrait Of Dorian Gray, our virtual physical world grows more beautiful every day, while the portrait, the zone of the natural world we live in, portrays the excessiveness of our ways. We all benefit from the harvesting of Earth’s vast gardens of Eden. The Earth isn’t dying, far from it, only the zone we live in. It’s 4 billion years old and has seen much worse things happen. If people were to disappear and the extinctions of large animals continued, the Earth would still be teeming with life. The waiting line to go from tiny secluded niche, to the wide open space of planet Earth, is filled with volunteers, many too tiny to see, all anxiously, but patiently, waiting for their chance to grab the brass ring.
The Natural World is run as a polluting factory that is burning up the Earth, literally shoveled into the furnaces of industry. That is what is pictured inside the picture frames. Sunlight, plants, and trees, are thrown into hoppers that convert them into money that goes up in smoke, and changes clean water into broken, dysfunctional, polluted rainbows, that course through the land, air, water, and our lives.
As I grew older, I changed from a life of technology, to one of the arts, writing poetry, stories, and pushing pixels around in an old windows 98 computer, running Photoshop 3. I ran across Leda And The Swan, the poem by W.B.Yeats, and the interpretation that Zeus had disguised himself as a swan, takes Leda, who represents the beauty of mankind, which yields the famous family of Troy. From bad things, good things happen. This is a classic case of shifting the blame by a world that wants to believe that people are not responsible for what is happening and the academia world will supply numerous examples of gods stepping in and stirring the pot.
Leda is the Earth, the swan is mankind, not a god from far off places doing things that a man can never do. Mankind is abusing the Earth, and creating stories that attempt to show that from bad things, good things happen. The Portrait of Dorian Gray ends with Dorian Gray, mankind’s physical virtual world, destroying the portrait, the part of the Natural World we live in, at which point, the part of the Natural World we live in comes back to life, as the body of Dorian Gray disappears in a pile of dust.
The first picture I am putting in an exhibition that is about things that have influenced us at some point in time. The picture is called The Landscape Of Dorian gray.
The Landscape Of Dorian Gray Robert Zwilling
https://images.gr-assets.com/photos/1...
The framed factories convert sunlight and trees and plants into money that goes up in smoke and changes clean water into dirty water that changes streams of air, water, and land into broken, polluted, rainbows of bright, dark, colors.
When I was a young child, I saw a central Connecticut river valley with a big stream running through the middle of it. The sides of the stream bank were stained bright colors of the rainbow. As the upstream factories discharged their waste into the stream, the height of the polluted water stained the banks of the stream. High dirty water marks. Sometimes it was one color from bank to bank, other times it was a layer of colors, each color’s height on the bank determined by how deep the polluted water discharge was. Just a little, and it was a single band along the bottom of the stream bed. A big deep discharge, brought the height of the color up to the top of the stream bank. Usually it was a combination of colors from how high the discharge rose, what color it was, and how many there were that day. A long, winding, brightly colored linear rainbow, snaking along the ground. A sight I never forgot, though it was a while before I knew what I had seen.
Dorian Gray’s body is the real, physical, virtual world we have built of glass, steel, concrete, and plastic. Powered by electricity, it stands tall, as an ornamental monument to our creativity. Dorian Gray’s portrait is a global picture of the zone of the natural world we live in, growing uglier day by day, as it loses its beauty of biological diversity. As in the story of the Portrait Of Dorian Gray, our virtual physical world grows more beautiful every day, while the portrait, the zone of the natural world we live in, portrays the excessiveness of our ways. We all benefit from the harvesting of Earth’s vast gardens of Eden. The Earth isn’t dying, far from it, only the zone we live in. It’s 4 billion years old and has seen much worse things happen. If people were to disappear and the extinctions of large animals continued, the Earth would still be teeming with life. The waiting line to go from tiny secluded niche, to the wide open space of planet Earth, is filled with volunteers, many too tiny to see, all anxiously, but patiently, waiting for their chance to grab the brass ring.
The Natural World is run as a polluting factory that is burning up the Earth, literally shoveled into the furnaces of industry. That is what is pictured inside the picture frames. Sunlight, plants, and trees, are thrown into hoppers that convert them into money that goes up in smoke, and changes clean water into broken, dysfunctional, polluted rainbows, that course through the land, air, water, and our lives.
As I grew older, I changed from a life of technology, to one of the arts, writing poetry, stories, and pushing pixels around in an old windows 98 computer, running Photoshop 3. I ran across Leda And The Swan, the poem by W.B.Yeats, and the interpretation that Zeus had disguised himself as a swan, takes Leda, who represents the beauty of mankind, which yields the famous family of Troy. From bad things, good things happen. This is a classic case of shifting the blame by a world that wants to believe that people are not responsible for what is happening and the academia world will supply numerous examples of gods stepping in and stirring the pot.
Leda is the Earth, the swan is mankind, not a god from far off places doing things that a man can never do. Mankind is abusing the Earth, and creating stories that attempt to show that from bad things, good things happen. The Portrait of Dorian Gray ends with Dorian Gray, mankind’s physical virtual world, destroying the portrait, the part of the Natural World we live in, at which point, the part of the Natural World we live in comes back to life, as the body of Dorian Gray disappears in a pile of dust.