Gail Potocki: When Art Explores Mankind’s Relationship to Nature
A photo gallery, by Gail Potocki.
Gail Potocki, an award-winning Symbolist artist, born 1961, Detroit, Michigan, U.S., is a painter whose art explores mankind’s relationship to nature, arguably, the most important issue facing the world today.
Gail’s paintings pursue narratives of relationship, and trust, and passionately explore the struggle between human desires and the order of nature. Potocki highlights this relationship in pieces such as “Opened Apples,” a painting that demonstrates human wastefulness despite nature’s abundance of offerings. Other pieces focus on more specific environmental disasters, such as the 1989 Exxon Valdez oil spill, three-legged frogs, and overpopulation.
Utilizing the skills and techniques of the Old Masters in the 21st century, and Influenced by the elegant strength of Anthony Van Dyck and the melancholic mystery of the late 19th century French and Belgian Symbolists artists like Fernand Khnopff, Jean Delville, and Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Gails’ expression is rooted in compelling realism, and branches seductively into the realms of possibility.
Potocki’s first monograph, Gail Potocki: The Union of Hope and Sadness was released in the Summer of 2006 and features text by Thomas Negovan, Richard Metzger and Jim Rose. Gail was the First Place winner of the First International Online Symbolist Art Exhibition, and has exhibited at numerous exhibitions worldwide, sharing wall space with Gustav Klimt, Egon Schiele, H. R. Giger, Salvador Dalí, and Ernst Fuchs.(Wikipedia)
Photos and captions, courtesy of Gail Potocki, published in the The Huffington Post.
Silence:
Silence is a recurring theme in Symbolist artworks, communicating internal stillness and personal dialogue. In this painting, Potocki expands the idea to include silence as something we don’t speak of: the environmental carnage wrought in nature through events like the 1989 Exxon Valdez oil spill, and the chilling silence of the resultant landscape.
Plastic Vortex:
With animals trapped in the plasticized water, the figure in this painting recoils from the Grim Reaper-like seabird as she bears witness to an omen of the future of our oceans.
Red Spirals:
As the human population grows, so does its overflowing need for resources- its generation fueling more population growth in a never-ending spiral.
De Soleil:
“A few years ago I found a new story about a couple of kids finding a three-legged frog in a pond in Minnesota. This would have probably been written off as an anomaly except that it has become a common occurence. Scientists view them as a ‘canary in the coalmine’ because with their sensitive skin they are one of the first indicators that our planet is not well.”
Opened Apples:
The apple suggests Earth and its abundance… which we bite away, and then carelessly discard; if the apple is a symbol of wisdom, then we are irreverently tossing it aside. The snake reaches for the Mamo egg, and only the light foot of the woman is holding it back: this is Nature’s future, at the mercy of human decision-making.
Catalyst:
Wrapped in oil-soaked birds, we bear witness to another unnatural disaster.
Thaw:
Exploring the mysteries of the bees: in this painting, they have returned from their journey and span the globe as a renewer of the compromised Earth.
Three Fates:
The order in which events occur has as much influence as the events themselves in the process of destiny. A series of moments unfold in the foreground as icebergs in the distance reveal the duality of nature- they appear massive and stable to the naked eye, but are experiencing a vast and powerful current of change beneath the surface.
Tiara:
Humanity is entwined with nature; drought and deforestation leave the Earth fleshless.
The Union of Hope and Sadness:
The quintessential balance of Nature: from suffering comes growth. The gardener’s hands are dirty from her explorations, and the vines feed and wound her, creating a synergy between her spirit and her effort. The result of her labor is presented, levitating as the most beautiful flower.
