Artwork: Sean Bodley

In the Anthropocene, art will help decide the fate of humanity, just as it did in the Holocene. Art has always been about visions; envisioning the past or the unseeable, fully observing the present moment, and imagining the future. I believe our ability to use our imagination is what will determine humanity’s fate on the spectrum of survival to extinction.

Art lives in the space between the routine and the unimaginable. Stories help us cross boundaries into new types of awareness. From the beginning of my art journey, stories from games, fantasy books, and movies inspired me to daydream and draw.

When I first learned to draw I felt that I could take fantasies, dreams, visions, and share them, through pictures. I doodled, studied plein air painting, figure drawing, vehicle design, game design, and many other subjects over the years to convey the visions in my head.

The first time I heard about climate change I didn’t believe it. It was beyond my understanding of the rhythm of the seasons. I knew that each season was different, but I couldn’t imagine how they could change beyond my scope of familiarity. But my initial disbelief was overpowered by curiosity and as I began to read on the subject, I felt that climate change was the biggest transformation on the planet that no one was seeing.

I soon discovered, many people were already thinking, concerned and organizing around environmental justice, and so after college I joined the chorus of artists focused on the environment.

In my sketchbooks you will find an equal weight of apocalyptic and utopian drawings. I am a paranoid optimist. Early on in my art journey I was inspired by books like Utopia or Oblivion by Buckminster Fuller, and The Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula K. Le Guin. These visionaries taught me that the ability to imagine, to break out of the current mode of thinking, is invaluable and that artists have a lot of great tools to do this. It’s also fun!

In each new artwork I make, whether fantastical or realistic, I am imagining and thinking about how life in this new era will look. Books like Visualizing Climate Change by Stephen Sheppard, Doughnut Economics by Kate Raworth, and Dire Predictions by Dr. Michael Mann deeply inform my work.

My ultimate goal is to be part of a community of artists and creatives who are passionate about visualizing climate change through stories. Stories and drawings can encode so many types of information and I think these are the tools that will help our culture transition to new ways of life in the Anthropocene. Artists like Swoon are foundational in teaching how artists can create art for Earth by embracing their climate grief and at the same time acknowledging the things they’re good at.

Initially I felt alone creating this type of “climate art” because the reality of global warming was denied by society, there was no viable market for employment at the time, and there were few venues for displaying such work. Now, however, there are buzzing communities of artists, like Artists vs. Extinction, who are constantly engaged with each other and exposing each other to different types of art, including 3D modeling, animation, and game design.

Groups like Water Is Life and Movement for Black Lives are on the front lines of environmental justice and are a major source of inspiration for my work. My latest vision is for hundreds and thousands of artists to create art centered on climate justice in the hope that together we can slow down and eventually stop the ecocide that defines this era.

You will often read that climate solutions are relative to local regions. One of my dreams is of a decentralized network of artists across the world serving as Resilience Visionaries in their local communities. They could help the community visualize changes that are coming to help people adapt and respond.

At the root of my art creation is my amazing mother, who nurtured my love for drawing. Also my grandmother, Caroline Greenwald, who exposed me to many wonders of nature and in whose footsteps I follow as a career artist. My wife, Dr. Stephanie Bora, constantly inspires me with her ideas, both scientific and culinary, alongside her wonder for the world!

I was born and raised in Madison, Wisconsin, and currently work in Los Angeles, California, as a background designer in the animation industry. For fun I love painting en plein air with the Warrior Painters and hiking in the mountains with my family.

Thank you for looking at the work, and I hope it inspires you to use your own imagination!

Wind Walkers

In the future, Wind Walkers brave hostile weather systems to acquire data that is as valuable as gold. This data allows the villages back home to better prepare for megastorms that get worse and worse each year. It’s a lonely existence, trekking for hundreds of miles in solitude, but Wind Walkers are a strange type, and you’ll rarely find one who has settled down.

Neo Germination

Scavenger oaks started sprouting up after the humans had gone away. The technoprimordial soup of e-waste landfills had sat long enough that new life forms began to evolve. After generations of acorns from a nearby grove spilled into the landfill, it brought about a digital fermentation of sorts that sparked new life. Now, many species of metallic plant life thrive on a transformed Earth.