Fire

 These are some of the UV paintings I'm preparing for the good people at GoodSpace up at the top of Broadway shopping centre carpark. There will be 3 pop up venues on level 3A, and another straight above on the roof, which has a spectacular view. 

The show opens on Friday april 15 (2022)

These images are of catastrophic fires, climate emergency events, the first from the suburbs near Denver Colorado that burnt 500+ houses in a night last Christmas, an unprecedented season for fire there. The other 2 are from the 2019-20 catastrophe in Eastern and Southern Australia, one is a pyro CB cloud over a fire in the Blue Mountains west of Sydney, and a closer view of burning forest is somewhere in southern NSW.

The invasion of Ukraine is about fossil fuel. Russia has refused to modernise the basis of its economy, as against the military industrial complex. (But in a kleptocracy even that sector is an illusion, and the Red Army is a hollow facade, equally monstrous in its attitude to its own personnel, but no longer effective unless it has utter air superiority). Fossil fuels give their owner power over their customers, creates enormous wealth imbalance and drives geopolitical gangsterism. Generating your own energy - the basis of economic production and wealth - and trading/sharing it in a grid with your peers, reduces some of the imbalance. Social Democracy or oligarchy?

Vladimir Putin thinks Russia is very cold so climate change = good. A profound miscalculation. The Taiga already sees massive fires, and is probably the place, alongside Canada, where we will find out just how huge in area  a pyro cumulus can became in decades to come. The steppe and the forest will move north in a fire driven process, as is already being seen. Bark beetles can survive further north, infest and kill non-resistant tree species.