Featured Image: “By invisible currents.” (Thoreau), 2026. Tar and oil on canvas.
Artist’s Statement
“Our truest life is when we are in dreams awake.” – Henry David Thoreau
“The most remarkable feature of this historical moment on Earth is not that we are on the way to destroying the world — we’ve actually been on the way for quite a while,” says ecologist, activist, and Buddhist scholar Joanna Macy in the 2014 documentary short, Joanna Macy and the Great Turning. What’s remarkable, she says, “is that we are beginning to wake up, as from a millennia-long sleep, to a whole new relationship to our world, to ourselves, and each other.”
In Dreams Awake is a series of paintings made with liquefied coal tar, a toxic byproduct of fossil-fuel extraction packaged and sold commercially as a sealant. This artwork’s medium is the very material through which modern civilization has transformed the earth and our relationship to it. In Dreams Awake leans into the space between longing for spiritual connection with Nature and awareness of ecological decline.
Much environmental art asks: What is happening to the planet? The question these paintings want to ask is closer to: What is happening to the human spirit as the planet changes? The first question produces warnings, information, advocacy, critique. The second wonder, history, mortality, and the sacred.
The title of each painting references writings from American Transcendentalists Ralph Waldo Emerson, Margaret Fuller, and Henry David Thoreau. The imagery, common New England flora and fauna, wavers indefinitely in and out of view.
“Draw a new circle.” (Emerson), 2026. Tar and oil on canvas board, 19th century frame.
“The true harvest of my daily life is … a little stardust caught.” (Thoreau), 2026. Tar and oil on wood, 19th century frame.
“The smallest sprout shows there is really no death.” (Whitman), 2025. Tar and oil on canvas, 19th century frame.
“If nature is never bound down, nor the voice of inspiration stifled, that is enough.” (Fuller), 2025. Tar and oil on wood, 19th century frame.
Some works are framed in vintage Victorian moldings that once held clock-faces, portraits, and mirrors sourced from New England attics and flea markets.
For Thoreau, as for Joanna Macy, the relationship between self and world is reciprocal. “The tree bears its fruit in the soul,” Thoreau writes in one of his journals. “It is the marriage of the soul with nature that makes the intellect fruitful and gives birth to imagination.” Yet, in the desperate consumption and commodification of nature that passes for modern life, we are “getting and spending” that which our ancestors saw as a living and independent entity rooted in divinity, mystery, and wisdom. “Without nature-awakened imagination most persons do not really live in the world,” Thoreau’s journal entry continues, “they merely pass through it as they live dull lives of quiet desperation.”
Today’s industrial-growth society faces a far more serious crisis than the one those New England thinkers saw in theirs. The “quiet desperation” Thoreau identified in nineteenth-century American culture has since metastasized into climate catastrophes, far-reaching profit-driven technological risks, and rudderless abuses of power both global and domestic.
In the end, the main question In Dreams Awake wants to raise is whether the essential insight of Transcendentalism – our intellectual and spiritual connection with the earth – can inform how we understand ourselves, our world, and the ecological crisis, before it is too late. Can we let Thoreau and his peers help us unplug, pause, and be present enough to face what we know to be true?
There was a time in the nineteenth-century, during the so-called “American Renaissance,” that a door opened onto the more beautiful world our hearts know is possible, the one that Indigenous peoples tried in vain to teach us to inhabit. Though we’ve grossly failed to cross it, the threshold flickers before us still.
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