DEATH OF A PLANET

I created this series of paintings as a warning about the danger facing our planet. Or rather, the planet and ourselves because we can’t detach ourselves from nature. We are the earth and the earth needs us. The damage we do affects everything and unless we wake up and put an end to out of control corporate greed. And it would serve us well to remember we need the earth far more than the earth needs us.

DEATH OF THE PLANET II
11×14
acrylic on canvas panel


The destruction of our planet means our destruction as well. It’s time to pay attention, to make noise, to use what we have to draw attention to this disaster shaped by greed and willful ignorance of science. Wildfires that destroy entire forests are normal now. Droughts are normal now. Skies filled with smoke and other pollutants is normal now. That’s why I painted this dark warning of a burning forest. The flames and the smoke and the charred trees are abstract expressions because I want people to feel what it’s like to lose an entire forest. I want people to wake up.

This painting is available for purchase on a print on paper, a print on canvas, or you can also purchase the original painting.

Kate Taylor’s Art

Death of A Planet III watercolor and ink on paper

A lit match is surrounded by clocks set to different doomsday times. Greed. Warm. Hot. Dead. I painted it in watercolor because I wanted to show the effects of the rising oceans due to climate change. There are vague figures fainting painted into the image that represent the voices that tried to warn but weren’t heard.

This painting is available for purchase on a print on paper, a print on canvas, or you can also purchase the original painting.

Kate Taylor’s Art

watercolor and ink on paper, environment, nature, global warming, climate change, political art, rising oceans, blue, doomsday clocks, lit match, black, abstract nature

11×14

mixed media on paper

I cut out pieces of a misprinted version of my novel “When The Last River Dies” and used it to create the mountains and rivers in the background. I also used bits of paper towel that were used to clean brushes. I used watercolors to show the rising sea levels, and acrylic paint for the flames that are caused by drought and global warming. I wanted to show how ordinary things we discard are part of the damage we are doing to our planet. We can’t keep living as though a life of disposable goods will not cost us dearly in the end.

Keywords

mixed media on paper, environment, nature, global warming, climate change, political art, rising oceans, paper from recycled novel, disposable, flames, black, abstract nature

This painting is available for purchase on a print on paper, a print on canvas, or you can also purchase the original painting.

Kate Taylor’s Art

DEATH OF THE PLANET V

11×14

watercolor and acrylic on paper

I wanted stark hills stripped of all growth and dead trees with only their charred trunks left standing to show the results of our neglect and abuse of the planet. Our precious forests are burning away in wildfires that have become seasonal instead of rare. The oceans are rising and flooding is destroying habitats that once provided food for species other than ourselves.

watercolor and acrylic on paper, environment, nature, global warming, climate change, political art, charred tree trunks, blue sky, bare hills, flames, black, abstract nature

This painting is available for purchase on a print on paper, a print on canvas, or you can also purchase the original painting.

Kate Taylor’s Art

DEATH OF THE PLANET VI

11×14

watercolor and acrylic on paper

Rising sea levels will devastate everything from coastal forests to farm lands. I used watercolors over the acrylic trees to depict them drowning and dying from the flooding caused by global warming and climate change. This is not some dire future warning. It is the present and if we don’t act now, future generations will never know what it was like to sit in the silence of a thickly forested hillside overlooking the ocean. We can’t let greed and indifference define the future. It is my hope that art will reach those who can’t see or hear the warnings any other way.

watercolor and acrylic on paper, environment, nature, global warming, climate change, political art, rising sea levels, blue, green, water, black, abstract nature

This painting is available for purchase on a print on paper, a print on canvas, or you can also purchase the original painting.

Kate Taylor’s Art

Embracing the Darkness

People who know me were surprised that my books were so dark. But those who know me really really well were not surprised. They knew I not only spent a good part of my life learning to dance with my demons, they also knew some of the events in my life that took me to places much darker than the world depicted in my books.

I tended to err on the side of kindness with my characters because I wanted models for good. We have enough models for bad. I spent over six intense years dealing with the dark evil that festered inside humanity. But the evil we dealt with on a daily basis was counteracted by those who went out of their way to be better, kinder human beings to neutralize the evil. That’s why I focused so much on the healing power of love in my books. I know its strength because for every horrendous evil we encountered, we also witnessed astonishing good.

I am an optimist who prefers to look at the positive things in life. I see solutions instead of problems. But I also understand everything seeks balance with something else, so I don’t shut out the evil. I don’t pretend it doesn’t exist. I take away its cover and shine the light on it. I consider that my responsibility as a human being. It’s my job as a writer who creates dystopian universes, to expose evil so it doesn’t hide in the shadows.

The dystopian universe I created is not all that imaginary. Global Warming is a threat I wanted those reading my book to take seriously, so I showed them what a world looked like when it wasn’t. There’s a lot of the now in my books that can lead to the events I depicted if we continue to look away.

We still have time to wake up. The glaciers are disappearing in our time and they are gone in my book’s time. We still have butterflies but we’re killing off the bees. Greed is not an imaginary problem but one of the most destructive forces in existence. It takes and takes and gives nothing back. If allowed to continue like an unsupervised toddler that grabs everything in its path, the world I created becomes a lot more real.

My optimism reveals itself most clearly in the characters I created. They believe in love. They believe in music, art, and in the majesty of nature. Their search for self is not for riches but to become better human beings. They understand, as I hope to make others understand, that who and what we are is rarely shaped with our own hands.

We are shaped by events, people, lovers, desires, and dreams. My characters were puzzles to themselves, but they saw the pieces. They knew who cut and shaped them, and who tried to make them fit inside a place that was all wrong. I wanted people to understand that before we healed the planet, we had to heal ourselves. It’s all part of the same string of beads.

And to heal ourselves we must understand how we became ill, how things became more important than people, how hate became more prevalent than love, how spirituality became a multibillion dollar manipulation of human consciousness.

All that required more than a surface swim in our own pools. I knew once those waters were stirred, the demons would want their say. No matter how much we try to block them from our lives, their voices penetrate our consciousness. They always want their say, no matter how much we try to pretend they don’t exist. We can turn away from the darkness, but that won’t make it light.

My books recognized the demons. They laid out the damage done by indifference, by misplaced blame, by feeling too powerless to change anything. I showed how the demons lived in a dystopian world created by those who were too unaware, too weak, too afraid to change themselves, much less step in and stop the damage to the planet. But I also showed many ways out. I showed how change began with us. I showed a better world began inside ourselves.

If that is dark, then maybe a little darkness is needed to make the necessary changes to heal ourselves and the planet, because it works together or not at all. No matter if we call it being one with everything, or say that god is everywhere, or believe we are are all stardust, it all ends at the same path, the one that leads to self-awareness, because without it, we are just empty buckets waiting to be filled with someone else’s agenda.

Kate Taylor’s Books and Art Ursine Logic

Why Nature Matters

Life moves at a slow pace where I live. There’s a lot of places to walk, to sit and contemplate, to be alone with just the sound of the waves against the shore. I’ve spent a great deal of my life living in such places. I sought them out. I made them part of the essentials I needed in order to live somewhere. I had to be within walking distance of a park, a lake, a river, an ocean. I needed trees, lots of trees, even if they were dry, shrubby water-starved sticks in the desert. They still spoke to me in their language. I still let them fill the empty spaces inside me.

 

Where I live now is the smallest, least populated place I’ve lived. I’ve noticed in the blissful years I’ve lived here that something is opening in me, a new introspection that comes partly with age, from that sense of having survived all the minor stuff that’s no longer worth wasting sleep over, and partly something else.

 

That something else is a closer relationship with nature. I’m retired. I have the kind of time I did as a child to just walk around, splash in the water, walk through a pile of freshly fallen leaves, and just sit and think about everything and nothing.

 

I often stand outside and gaze in wonder at the diversity of trees planted by my landlord. There’s everything from blue spruce to a giant sequoia. There’s fruit and nut trees. There’s trees with pretty leaves in the spring, summer, and fall, and stark, dramatic shapes in the winter. This is a land planted by a man who loves trees, and I am the recipient of the fruits he so lovingly planted.

 

But it’s the silence that makes my communication with these trees special. It allows me to hear them, to trace them inside me where they influence my thoughts, my emotions, my dreams. I wrote my novel in the shade of their summer and the beauty of their winter. They make me whole.

 

I’m going to repeat that. They make me whole. I repeat it because humanity lost that wholeness in the last few decades. Humanity lost its connection with nature and so it lost its wholeness. And an empty population is a miserable population.

 

That misery creates polarized times that demand sides must be taken in everything. It creates people who get up in the morning and choose which side to take that day. It demands a society where every person, idea, injury, slight, or petulant tantrum is examined for either allegiance or betrayal. It creates a society of us and them instead of we and one.

 

This is a sickness caused by losing the connection with nature. The frenzy and noise of even a few minutes in an urban environment is more than enough to break the purity of the connection. The degradation of this connection infects people by making things that were once cherished and valued, become cheap and meaningless. The simplicity of love, of friendship, of companionship becomes diminished because simplicity itself becomes diminished.

 

It creates a dependence on things instead of people. The constant storms, fires, and disasters caused by the abuse of our planet creates a fear of nature. It turns nature into something to conquer and exploit.

 

The sad thing is, when people do this, they further distance ourselves from the very thing they need to heal, the simple thing that is so complex, so hard to attain. They get lost in the noise to the point where they allow themselves to remain in a constant state of war and anxiety with not only each other, but also with their own selves. There is no contemplative silence to feed them.

 

So they strike out. They blame. They accuse. They find reasons for their misery that have nothing to do with them. They push everything outside themselves. They run from meaningful friendships, from loving relationships, from kindness, from altruism, from compassion. They embrace emptiness because there’s nothing left inside that feeds them. Everything takes from them. Everything makes the hole inside them deeper.

 

That is why, now, more than ever, we need those quiet places where we can just sit in the presence of majestic trees, and gaze upon awe-inspiring mountains, drink in amazingly blue, green, and turquoise water. We need to just sit and listen and let nature fill the emptiness. If we don’t, then we will destroy each other with our hunger.

My personal website:
Ursine Logic’s Books and Art