Gail Potocki painting show in Los Angeles

 08Potocki Images Large Thaw

Chicago-based symbolist artist Gail Potocki has a new show of provocative, masterful paintings opening Saturday, November 15, at Billy Shire Fine Arts gallery in Los Angeles. The show, titled "Opened Apples," runs until December 5 and is also viewable online.
Above, "Thaw" (oil on linen in handmade frame, 68" x 36"). Below left, "Corrupted Mother" (oil on linen in handmade frame, 42.75" x 54.75"). Potocki was recently interviewed for a special online feature in Hi-Fructose. From the interview:

 08Potocki Images Large Corruptedmother-2

For the last few years I have focused heavily on environmental themes with my work. I think the stresses humans are putting on the ecosystem are the most serious problems we are facing, so it is difficult for me to paint about more personal issues or to do humorous work. I am always thinking about how fragile the world really is and how close elements of it are to collapsing.

I think of the apple as a symbolic representation of the earth and, of course from the story of the Garden of Eden, as paradise. In the painting "Opened Apples" for example, a woman is taking bites out of apples and throwing them to the ground. It represents humans' careless disregard for the natural world and wasteful consumption. The idea of "Opened Apples" made me think of how we have savagely bitten into the symbolic "earth" apple and left it to turn brown and rot. Also, when I thought of the title I was thinking of the opening of Pandora's Box as a metaphor of what we are doing by "opening the apple" and unleashing unforeseen consequences.

I've addressed my concern with the plight of the honeybees quite a bit in this body of work. The mysterious loss of such a huge percentage of the bee population is one of the most alarming collapses and seems to be happening so silently with little press or media concern. I wanted to show the importance of this issue by making the bees larger than life while meeting their death in mysterious ways that I have imagined. In "Corrupted Mother" I use the woman as a representation of an ecosystem so corrupted that it is turning against itself. She is handing over the apple (paradise) to the evil aspects of humanity (snake). Even the snake is corrupted and is a mutation with two heads. In the background a polar bear walks through increasingly larger hoops of fire as a symbol for a rapidly warming planet.

Gail Potocki's "Opened Apples" (Billy Shire Fine Arts), Online Feature & Preview: Gail Potocki (Hi-Fructose) (Thanks, Richard Metzger!)