Green

Acrylic on canvas board. 12″x16″.
© April 2024.

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“Green” is a journey with no apparent end.

My partner took me to a museum in Spring 2024, where he introduced me to a Mark Rothko painting purchased for $58 million. It was a lovely orange square; don’t get me wrong. But it was a $58 million orange square, purchased and housed in a region of immense, heart-breaking, gut-wrenching, dystopian poverty and ongoing human rights violations. Its owner thought $58 million for an orange square painted by someone who isn’t alive anymore was more appropriate than a $58 million investment in living, breathing, deserving local Queer artists who cannot afford rent and are being actively targeted by local legislative corruption, up to and including their imprisonment for merely existing in public.

“I could paint that!” I cried in anguish upon learning the purchase price of the orange square.

“Yeah,” my partner said. “But you didn’t. Rothko did.”

The next day, I owned a paint brush set and acrylic paints. I sat down with Bob Ross and made a mess of a landscape painting with a lake and trees. It was glorious and liberating and not yet worth $58 million.

Weeks later, still reflecting on Rothko’s work and grateful to have been so deeply disturbed to action, I sat down to this canvas with only green paints to see what might happen if I painted a canvas with only one color. “Green” was the result.

“Green” is a journey with no apparent end.