Hot Earth - Fire & Heat

In my new series of paintings begun at in late 2021, beginning of 2022, I evoke a future world that is hotter and wetter, where rising CO2 levels and plant life explodes in beautiful and bizarre ways. The result is a forest of plant fantasies, populated with ambiguous forms , erotically evoking excited sensual states of floral efflorescence and an ecstasy of growth. A world of extremes, where alien and invasive species adversely impact the ones we have evolved to depend on and more of our water be consumed by vegetation. I also take from my inspiration the novel Hothouse. Hothouse is a 1962 science fiction novel by British writer Brian Aldiss Set in a far future, The Sun has swollen to fill half the sky and, with the increased light and heat, the plants are engaged in a constant frenzy of growth and decay, like a tropical forest enhanced a thousandfold. The plants – many now omnivores – have filled all the ecological niches on the land and in the air, many evolving primitive nervous systems and, in some cases, eyes; of the animals, all other land and air animals have been driven to extinction by the vegetable kingdom, apart from a few shore dwellers. The humans live on the edge of extinction, within the canopy layer of a giant banyan tree that covers half the continent.