junkyard | Artist Commentary

“Vestige” by Amy Guidry; Acrylic on canvas; 12″ x 12″; (c) Amy Guidry 2017

I’m so happy to announce my finished painting, Vestige. It features a grizzly bear atop old cars in a junkyard. Flowers grow out of his back as a reminder of the connection of all life forms and also serving as a symbol of a vestige of nature among waste.

When I was a child, I diligently worked on a book I was “writing” about animals (it mostly consisted of drawings). My thinking was that if they were good enough illustrations, people would then care about animals as much as I did. I still feel the same today- paint animals so that people will care about them, see them, really see them, for who they are, all part of this Earth.

While working on this painting, I’ve been focused on how much gets sent to landfills, creating a new “landscape” in which trees are removed and replaced with garbage. It has even inspired a recycling fiend such as myself to discover new ways to reduce and reuse.

Vestige is an acrylic on canvas, 12″ wide by 12″ high. You can view it online here: https://amyguidry.com/vestige.html.

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A few photos of my current painting in progress. I had started this painting just a few days before Grizzly bears were removed from Endangered Species status. Sad, but fitting. 700 bears in the wild is not a high number, especially if there is a major disaster, and to ensure no genetic mutations occur due to inbreeding. Our priorities need to change. So it’s fitting that I happened to choose a Grizzly as my subject for this piece. We are steadily creating desert landscapes full of our garbage- in this case, a junkyard of cars- as we clear out the natural habitat of so many species, many endangered. I used flowers growing out of the bear’s back as a reference to our connection to nature; this lone patch of flowers mirroring the small, shrinking natural landscape.