Water is central to life on earth. As Da Vinci said, water is “the earth’s blood.” As a naturalist and painter, I have been painting birth, growth, decay, death and renewal in nature for three decades and find myself drawn to the edges of swamps, ponds, rivers and oceans. I look to water to tell me about the many changes in the environment. water is always changing. As water changes, it changes its environment whether through erosion, flooding, nutrition, or drought. And what we as humans do upstream, will, through the water, affect what happens downstream.
ig: @ilana_manolson
As I look at nature and reflect, I find myself observing, responding to and painting water’s fluid form. My paintings refer to both the seen and imagined; the marks and pools of paint transform the landscape into metaphors for tenacious life in which some species thrive and others disappear. Swaths of pure fluid color appear wave-like, close up, and then fall into perspective at a distance, confounding and surprising the viewer. I paint and edit simultaneously. I capture the growing and the dying with the fluidity of the medium.