Some background: I began this painting after reading an essay on ecological amnesia (i.e. how our culture has forgotten the abundance of wildlife that once filled North America). I had no idea just how vast the extinct passenger pigeon populations were in the 1800s. To see more than a billion birds in the sky at once sounds so incredibly breathtaking & to know that I, nor anyone else will ever experience that was more than a bit heartbreaking. It jarred me into reflecting on extinction—the profound eternity of it. It's tragic immensity.
This got me mourning for the sky—it’s history—and musing about the Carrington Event of 1859. A massive solar storm in early September of that year. The storm was so intense the Aurora could be seen as far south as the tropics. To see such intense fleeting beauty at once existing with a billion birds in the sky must have been deeply astounding.
Which led me to wonder about what could have been. Alternate futures. Differing outcomes of consequence. There is a kind of misleading finality to the present moment I think. As if it was always going to be the way it is. But in learning of the past, you realize just how very different this world could have been if things had gone another way. For better, for worse, and the individuals and events that had a far-reaching influence in the aftermath we inhabit.
Along this vein I read about John Brown & Harriet Tubman. That they worked together for some time in southern Ontario—a major nesting site of the passenger pigeon flocks. There, sometime in 1859, she aided him in planning the raid on Harper’s Ferry; recruiting freed slaves for the effort — which is thought by some to be the symbolic start of the Civil War.
All of this was present together in the late summer of 1859. Although it is unlikely in this precise manner. But in this, there is a boundless aspect to all junctures in time; the possibilities and infinite outcomes available to us. Always.
