An artist set out to paint climate change. She ended up on a journey through grief - Los Angeles Times

This article was educational and comforting. She uses her art work to capture the viewer in a moment with the intention of making them pause and think about the larger questions surrounding climate change. This message and these confusing questions evoke discomfort in the viewer while they observe a peaceful and delicate, abstracted landscape. I think it is this intentional aim of using a subject for its beauty to attract and capture the attention of the viewer for a deeper meaning, that I engage with the most. I am choosing to convey this message using the human form; the female form, to be more specific. I relate to the weight that not completely accepting climate change bears on ones shoulders. I am practicing refocusing my energy into reimagining myself in this world that is transforming beneath us. Looking at her paintings I get lost in the wash of different colours and find intrigue in the fragmented nature of the lines which depict the missing fragments in the Glacier. I wonder if I could transfer this fragmented pattern onto my skin to create an abstracted illusion piece? 

I have compiled my highlights of the article:

(Genaro Molina / Los Angeles Times)

An artist set out to paint climate change. She ended up on a journey through grief - Los Angeles Times

“missing chunks of the Eliot Glacier on Mt. Hood that had melted away because of climate change”

“After Molnar had created more paintings of vanishing ice, it hit her: this is what it feels like to try to hold the enormous losses brought about by climate change. Global warming is transforming Earth’s landscapes and ecosystems, swelling the seas and driving many species closer to extinction. It has already contributed to natural disasters, famines and wars. Even if you accept that humans are to blame, it can be hard to absorb the full weight of such unpleasant facts. But what if that’s the problem? What if acting on climate change requires that we first let ourselves feel its true costs? Molnar was about to find out.”

“Some have created overtly political works that evoke outrage or guilt, like a sculpture that was displayed in Paris during the 2015 United Nations climate talks: a polar bear impaled on an oil pipe. Others pay homage to the beauty of the world, like Zaria Forman, who paints stunning hyper-realistic images of ice using her fingertips instead of brushes. “The welter of emotions that people feel about the climate crisis, they can see in the mirror of art,” said Miranda Massie, director of the Climate Museum in New York City.”

“But despite the paintings’ cheery palette, they give Molnar — and viewers — an opportunity to engage with the staggering scope and interconnectivity of climate change. “You can’t extract one piece of receding glacier from another,” Molnar said. To aid her audience, a brief description accompanies each piece, explaining that the shapes represent pieces of land where ice has melted away. Molnar adds that “this new earth is like a wound, or new, delicate skin that has formed over a wound and is now (ready or not) exposed to the world.” ”

“As she immersed herself in these muddled geometries, Molnar, who is petite with curly black hair and a Bonnie Raitt streak of gray, began to tap into a turbid well of emotion. It is apparent by the third piece. Overlapping shapes bruise dark blue to black, and ragged crimson lines slash across the canvas. “The project isn’t just a way to convey information,” she said. “It’s a way to confront grief. ”Grief is an unpleasant cocktail of emotions: sadness, anxiety, shame and helplessness, to name a few. Psychologists recognize it as a normal — even necessary — response to loss. And its growing prevalence is yet another impact of climate change. Those on the front lines mourn the loss of homes burned by wildfires, landscapes altered by drought or melting ice, and traditions overturned by ecological upheaval. Some grieve for lost futures, or for innocent animals that had the bad luck to exist at this particular moment in geologic time. It can be an overpowering and ongoing source of pain, said Ashlee Cunsolo, who studies environmental change and mental health at the Labrador Institute of Memorial University in Canada.”

“ “The environmental grief of climate change is often described as grief without end,” she said. Yet climate grief is often stigmatized — or simply not talked about at all. “A lot of people will either say, ‘I have never told anyone this because I feel silly,’ ” Cunsolo said. “Or they would say, ‘I could never figure out why I was feeling this way. I never had language.’

”Even climate activists often encourage us to focus on solutions, not sadness, said Jennifer Atkinson, who teaches environmental humanities at the University of Washington in Bothell. “There’s this whole part of the environmental community that’s the hope police,” she said. Many fear that dwelling in such dark feelings could make people shut down. But avoiding them is no better, warns Rosemary Randall, an advisor to the Climate Psychology Alliance, a group of psychotherapists in the U.K. who specialize in addressing the mental health consequences of global warming. Refusing to feel the emotional costs of climate change is just another insidious and socially sanctioned form of denial, she said — one rooted in the classic psychological defense of compartmentalization.”

“ “There’s one part of yourself that knows perfectly well that climate change is happening and another part of yourself that really doesn’t let that penetrate,” she said. “It doesn’t really ever get into your heart.” The split is reinforced by society’s tendency to see climate change as a scientific issue, rather than a cultural and political challenge that demands our full humanity — the kind more often explored and addressed through art. It was unseasonably hot when Molnar began painting on her back porch in the summer of 2017. Temperatures in Portland topped 100 degrees and the water from the rain barrel seemed even more precious. Molnar felt as though climate change was bearing down on her. And as she got lost in the process of creating, she experienced grief as a kaleidoscope of feelings. While painting an extremely intricate piece — one composed of slivers of land lost or threatened by rising seas — she felt a surge of anxiety. Sometimes, she shut down completely, unable to work.”

“How strange it is to bring them to piano lessons and coach their soccer teams and sort of generally pretend that everything is fine when you know it isn’t,”

“Grief, Worden said, is an ongoing set of tasks — like making space for uncomfortable feelings and adjusting to a new reality — that can be embraced or ignored. The goal, after all, isn’t to “fix” grief. It’s to learn to live with loss. “When somebody dies, you don’t stop remembering them or missing them. You create a way forward which has meaning,” Randall said. If you don’t, she said, “you end up withdrawn, embittered, resentful, and inactive.” And though some may mock it, grief can also be a powerful tool.

“The fate of my country rests in your hands,”

“That changed the climate discussion forever,” Cunsolo said. It made people realize that “this is not a technological issue, this is not an infrastructure issue. This is a human pain issue.”

“I ended up in a much more confused space, which is a space I’m still in. But it is a more honest space.”

“It becomes something you are focusing on when you should be focusing much larger.”

For her, the larger questions are: Can we reimagine a way to be human that doesn’t cause so much suffering for others? And how do we make space for the hard conversations, individually and collectively? This, Randall said, is what it ultimately means to grieve climate change. The world is transforming, and we must all reimagine ourselves in it.

“I made them that way so that we might be willing to feel the discomfort of confusion and grief a little longer,” she said. “To feel it, at least for a moment. To let it in.”