On the Easel Today: "Food Abandonment"

This painting is still in progress. It is part of the serious on justice and contemporary issues I am creating for my show in September.

Have we lost ourselves? Have we lost our humanity? For two hundred thousand years we have planted, hunted and harvested our own food. This is a painting I did from a series of photographs I took last fall. The apples had been ripe for weeks and nobody picked them. People in my neighborhood let fruit ripen and drop to the sidewalks to be stepped on. Beautiful, sweet apples and nobody cared to eat them.

People don't even know what to do with food on a tree. They have forgotten. I grew up planting and canning with my Grandmothers. I worked in their gardens. I grew up planting and harvesting on the family farm and family ranch. When the last American farm is sold to a mega-corp manufacturer of food and the farmers are gone, who are we?

We are no longer human, we have become nothing more than consumers and we are raised and conditioned to buy mindlessly and contribute to a bloated financial system that will destroy our planet in less than a generation.

And I get all that from a pretty painting of an apple tree....