Sue Swartz

The Earth Will Be Fine Without Us

The story of Noah is one of undoing. Of destruction and de-creation. Humans have transformed the Earth generation after generation and like proud children, we usually focus on the beauty of where our desire has led: advances in medicine, buildings that sweep the sky, global communication. It is so much harder to acknowledge the downside – pollution, greed, war, noise, ugliness. As we face a planet damaged, perhaps forever, by human action, the biblical deluge calls on us to consider who is to be saved and who left behind, how suffering takes shape, and what happens after the waters have wreaked their havoc. What would happen if time started anew?

I began my encaustic painting, Earth Will Be Fine Without Us, with forty 5” X 5” cradled panels. At that point, all I knew was that I wanted to incorporate repetition and a bit of monotony in the process of making the piece. Forty days is a long time to be trapped in a large floating box on the ocean with nothing but animals, time, and destruction. Each panel was painted separately at each phase of the painting so that it was its own story as well as part of a whole.

Encaustic paint is made of beeswax, pigment, and resin. It is brushed or poured on to a hard substrate (in this case, wood), where it cools almost immediately and must be fused to the layer below it. All of the early stages of Earth relied on the transparent and translucent quality of the wax to create a multi-layered story of human habitation on the planet – a garden green world on top of which humans built basic structures, a foot path, symbols. Then came domination of nature: agriculture, water distribution, brick cities, noisier and dense civilizations, borders & languages, the burning of coal, electricity, over-crowding, globalization, a monotony of products, noise and more noise.

Then: a graying of the painting. Clouds. Denial. And a whitening, as if through a rainstorm, covering up more of the human, and finally a thick coat of titanium white paint – a stillness when there is nothing outside of the waters. There was no going back to how it used to be. It was painful to say goodbye to each layer of paint, and particularly so when the thick overcoat was applied. Will our planet feel similarly when we are gone? Did God have a moment of hesitation when the rains began?