Alice Zinnes

Save The Earth

Artists respond to the climate crisis



Alice Zinnes


Lost In The Fog Of Hope, oil pant, 36" x 44"


    "Dreams. For me, making art is dreaming, being open, allowing forms, space and light to flow slowly through me, like the absorption of oil into cloth. Not illustrations or literal translations, my art transforms ancient myths to mysterious worlds where the boundaries between underworld and waking earth are traversable, terror coexists with joy, and loss yields to renewal. My art pieces, inspired by The Ramayana, Ovid’s Metamorphosis and the ancient Roman novel The Golden Ass by Apuleius, are quiet landscape narratives in the guise of abstract explorations. Emotional tensions are transformed into forms emerging from light and dark, suggestions of figures in space. Beginning with myths, I hope to create epic spaces where the world at its least understandable is made concrete.

    Since high school when I was president of the Ecology Club, a club instrumental in initiating community curbside recycling, caring about and for the environment has always been central to who I am.  For about ten years beginning in 2008 I was at the center of the anti-fracking movement, balancing three full-time jobs: that of artist, teacher and activist.  With deep reflection, I realized all these activities represented different manifestations of my view that as humans we must be connected to the world at large through being connected to our own inner emotional and intellectual cores.


    Though lyrical and semi-abstract, my art indirectly relates to my environmentalism.  Commercialism has turned our humanity into a deadly pastiche of plastic emotions: We buy to camouflage our alienation, uncontrollably burning fossil fuels that threaten our very existence. By expressing our deepest emotions, my art reflects my core belief that to save life as we know it, we must return to our spiritual centers where we value our fellow human beings, and discover just how much our own needs flow with the ecological life forces of the planet."



Alice Zinnes

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