Sights Unseen: What happens beyond our windows when we aren't looking
UNSEEN MOCKINGBIRD:
oil paint and pastels on paper and wood panel
27" x 36" x 2.5"
High voltage transmission lines were forced through our farming community to carry electricity to distant places. Mockingbirds mimic the calls of other birds, sometimes at night. But the power line brings with it a wide swath of herbicide, destroying the birds' habitat.
UNSEEN COYOTES:
oil paint on paper on wood panel
18" x 24" x 1.5"
Before the strip mine started outside our window, we enjoyed hearing coyotes at night. Human and coyote spaces were compatible until our demand for more energy altered their space.
TREE REMOVAL, oil paint on wood panel, 20” x 30”,
WORK SPACE, oil paint on wood panel, 20” x 30”
The room where I paint looks out on a slope where cows grazed. But when a permit for a strip mine was approved, the trees were cut down. The daytime interior view looks out on what was. The nighttime view removes the walls to reveal the heaps of coal on the horizon and the stumps of the trees.
MIDNIGHT AT NOON: oil paint on wood panel, 30” x 21” x 1.25”
SUMMER INTO WINTER: oil paint on wood panel, 31” x 20” x 1.25”
What was once a pasture is now an abandoned strip mine. The sunny, safe interior space contrasts with the destruction to the land outside. The split and nonaligned panels emphasize how out-of-sync the day/night and summer/winter views can be.
TWO CROWS CIRCLING: oil paint, oil pastel and watercolor on paper and
canvas. 24” x 36”
NOCTURNE: oil paint, acrylic and wax on paper and canvas
The daytime view from our house looking toward the strip mine disappears with the moonlit night. The daytime crows give way to the ghost of an owl perched on an Amish chair.
LINE OF POWER: acrylic paint on wood panel, 20” x 30”
VIEW FROM HOME: acrylic paint, twigs, encaustic on wood panel, 20” x 30”
Most of us live our lives in comfort inside. Our comfort is largely the result of burning fossil fuels. As few people would visit an abattoir to see where their dinner comes from, few people see where their electricity comes from or understand the long-term costs.
Background to the Work
There has always been coal removal in my neighborhood of Sugar Grove, west of Morgantown, West Virginia. In the old days most houses near an exposed coal seam would dig their own coal for personal use from what was called a kitchen or punch mine. Some of these portals are still visible.
As machinery became more powerful, strip mining, or the removal of ground to expose a large swath of a coal seam, became possible. When we built a house in Sugar Grove in 1978, there were a few small strip mines around. Slowly they became bigger and the blasts to remove the ‘overburden’ more powerful. Interesting that the very ground on which people lived was described as a burden.
Our neighbors were mostly farmers who kept cows to breed calves to send to feedlots. We never kept animals ourselves but were glad to let a neighbor take hay off our pasture for his cows. Before 2007, a farmer named John Bucy, who refused to sell his coal seam to stripping companies, died and his sons who lived far away sold the land to a local lawyer, who soon had it stripped. The first Bucy mine, a most inappropriate name, began in February of 2007 on Sugar Grove Road.
I have walked Sugar Grove Road most days since 2003 and as the small hill farms gave way to strip mines, I carried my camera to document the changes. In 2010, a big power line was routed through our neighborhood using eminent domain. People forced to have the big pylons on their land decided to sell out to stripping companies as well. Soon, Bucy #2 Mine (S-2008-09) was underway, whose progress along Sugar Grove Road I photographed daily.
In 2011 we received a letter from the mining company asking us to come see them to ‘discuss business’. That was a dark day indeed because it meant neighbors close to us had already agreed to a stripping contract. We ignored the letter. The permit process for Bucy #3 Mine (S-2002-12) moved forward, despite our attempts to stop the permit. As West Virginia gets much of its revenue from coal severance taxes, the WV Department of Environmental Protection rarely turns down a permit application. So our attempts to stop another strip mine in a farming area went nowhere.
In August of 2012, the strip mine, whose boundary would come up to our fence line, got underway. We bought a movie camera to document the blasts, dust and noise from the heavy machinery that often began at 5 am and went on until midnight. I collected a lot of images. Apparently all the residents of the area just had to tolerate the cracked walls, noise and dust so that a handful of people could make money.
In May of 2014, the stripping company declared bankruptcy, having made their money, and skipped out on their debts to their employees and subcontractors. The insufficient bond money posted to cover the reclamation was forfeited and the state of WV is left to clean up the abandoned mines. But West Virginia has little money so reclamation may never happen. See a 3-minute video HERE showing the impact on our streams of the abandoned mines seven years later.
Much of the art work presented here grew from the photos I took of the changes in my neighborhood. Unlike words, images are understandable by everyone across time, space and culture, which is why we can look at Paleolithic cave paintings and know the ‘what’, if not the ‘why’. Looking for poetic meaning in my domestic space is another reason to make the images. But my images are also aimed at people of the future, to apologize for our collective squandering and destruction of their world.
The artwork presented here is about a particular time and place: the peripheral areas of Morgantown, West Virginia in the early 21st Century, a period of significant change from coal as king to coal as history. It will not be easy for the state to create a new revenue source and especially a new identity. But the state mascot is a mountaineer, not a coal miner, so perhaps we should return to the original mountain identity but with a 21st Century awareness.
My artwork is intimate and domestic. I think of it as a diary of the time I have lived here - a small sliver of the long history of this corner of Appalachia. It is set against the backdrop of the universe as seen in the many starry skies in my paintings.
Learn More
Following is my 11-minute video to show the impact of a strip mine on our neighborhood. Blasting, noise and dust were the beginning. Acid mine drainage is the lasting result.