Breathers

Breathers

Breathers

Breathers are a major subject in my art. Literally, anything that breathes. Grasshoppers, groupers, giraffes. Bacteria, but now I know there are anaerobic bacteria and they belong in the cohort too. And in recent decades we’re learning so much about interspecies plant communications that in my heart (tho not vocabulary) the vegetable world has earned its way in as well. So l’chaim. To life.

To all things that change at a rate our lifetimes can observe. Marble has a life history of metamorphosing limestone, but over the span in which scores of species come and go, ebb and flow, become, evolve, pass from Earth.

Some of those Breathers are reincorporated into the rock of fireplace surrounds. Don’t ask if any older species are in there too.

Our understanding of time is anthropocentric. If we can watch the seed send up a shoot, vine its way up a lattice, bloom, fade, desiccate, winter over in snow — that’s a life cycle, seasonal, that we can conceptualize. How many summers old are you?

The life cycle of a granite kitchen counter began eons before kitchens came to be. I confess they anger me — talk about a non-renewable resource!

For human purposes you can’t package an eons-involving thought and fit it into your brain. Our understandings include an out-of-grok range.

The artworks here intentionally represent differing approaches to depicting breathers. As with all my art, a style is not the point — the combining of images is.

Here I’ve picked four of many gambits