Ildlife Unservation Area   1998 
Acrylic on canvas, cedar and pine cone frame  78 x 55”

No matter how responsibly we as a species try to maintain, manage and conserve nature, we leave our footprints wherever we tread and our fingerprints on whatever we touch. 
   Nature is always in flux, it is constantly evolving.  The fit survive and the weak perish, and in the face of this evolution, in the face of the inevitable plod of geological time, we are all weak and will all eventually perish.  Nature itself, though, will survive.
   The central symbolic image in this painting is the barbed wire being subsumed by the tree.  After years, a tree will start growing right around a piece of wire that has been attached to it.  Usually, this results in an ugly, ulcerated kind of growth. To me, this represents not just mankind’s footprint on nature, but also nature’s ultimate victory over that destructive interaction. 
   The secondary symbolic elements of this painting are the flower growing around the wire, the acorn at the end of the branch,  and the “protection” sign nailed right into the living tree.