Wangari Maathai dies at age 71

I was saddened to hear that Wangari Maathai, the 2004 Nobel Peace Prize recipient died from cancer at the age of 71. The New York Times obituary can be found here. She believed that environmental degradation and unbridled development were among the roots of poverty.
"You cannot protect the environment unless you empower people, you inform them, and you help them understand that these resources are their own, that they must protect them," Professor Maathai said on the website of the movement she founded, The Green Belt Movement. She started the group in 1977, encouraging poor women to collect native tree seeds in the wild, cultivate them and set up tree nurseries for a livelihood, paying them a small sum for any trees they planted. One aim was to ensure poor families had access to sustainable firewood for cooking and water for drinking.


I was moved by her efforts and as a student at the San Francisco Art Institute in 2004, I wanted to create art that would honor her and that would speak to deforestation. A created a shrine with hand printed postcards of her image and drawings of trees on discarded pieces of wood for a 2 week intensive class with Brett Cook-Dizney. After graduating in 2005, i continued thinking about how i would create my deforestation awareness paintings. I spent 2005-2007 working on this problem that culminated in the "trees posing" series where trees were painted as if posing for a family photography or in familiar poses.
Unfortunately,because my computer crashing earlier this year, I lost all my high quality images. I only have thumbnails shown here. I have slides of many and all the images are on my website.

I occasionally create a new painting for the series because i enjoy making them. This body of work helped me to develop my cold wax medium that i use for my color field paintings.