Unfinished Business in the Garden of Eden

This past Summer, as I’ve continued my self-exile in Switzerland, I’ve accelerated my creative focus on the tribulations of our modern times.

Through acrylic collage works building mainly on early post-WWII East German sheet music featuring Johann Sebastian Bach sonatas, and nature-inspired color studies, as well as a series of hand-painted paper bags building on both of these motifs, I’ve explored various themes: the rapid decline of democracy in my homeland and across the world, humanity’s expanding degradation of itself and the planet, and the role of art, music, culture, faith, and community in resisting the worst of present trends.

The Leipzig-produced music sheets I’ve incorporated throughout this collection are from circa 1950. They are poignant for their straddling of both the repressive Nazi fascism and Soviet communism that stifled the East German landscape during the middle- to late-20th century. But, on the upside, even those horrific epochs in modern world history could not–and did not–erase the beauty or the magic of nature, nor the human works of art, culture, and music that have always informed the best of life’s meaning and purpose.

So much of what my evolving creative body of works seeks to accomplish rests with my desire to push hard against the overwhelm that our modern times have subjected all thinking people to as a result of the world’s continuing relentless push for never-ending accumulation, ever bigger, more ‘blingy,’ and more egocentric development and consumption, and neverending war, violence, hatred, volume, ugliness, and othering as the means to get there.

In response to these hard realities, my latest creative product is consciously, if quietly, driven to contest the normalization of present and evolving tendencies rooted in aggrandizement, power grabbing, selfishness, egocentrism, vanity, and insensitivity to the essential requirements of more peaceful, just, harmonious, and sustainable ways of living.

My latest works are intentionally small in scale–generally smaller than 2′ x 3′ in dimension and more often than not in the 16″ x 12″ or 5″ x 7″ range.

For the most part, while they almost always address daunting social, economic, and political questions, these works are nevertheless visually designed to inspire calm in the eye of the storm.

They typically appear on recycled materials, usually cardboard, old sheet music, and used paper shopping bags.

And, in almost every case, they seek to offer a POV that challenges and inspires all of us to do more for the world and eachother, by consuming, acquiring, competing, and self-focusing far less. 

My newest work lifts up values and imperatives that history’s most-revered visionaries and influencers from various fields have championed for time immemorial–from exemplars like Jesus of Nazareth to John Lennon and Yo-Yo Ma, and from Sojourner Truth to Diana Spencer and Dolores Huerta: harmony, humanity, and healing; justice, care, and kindness; and reverance for love, community, and mutual respect.

Without these fundamental commitments, we can never truly live fully and freely. So long as there is war and hatred, hoarding and poverty, and cruelty and injustice in our laws and institutions, there can never truly be peace.

For as long as humanity has inherited and stewarded the Garden of Eden, we have occasionally achieved great heights. But, far too often, we have squandered the greatest gifts that God and nature have afforded us.

It’s long past time to get right with one another and the planet. There is much unfinished business in the Garden of Eden.