What do you see?

As an artist, it's incumbent upon me to be observant and to notice the things that many people overlook in our surroundings. This was first impressed upon me when I began to seriously study figure drawing at the age of 16. Fed up with the lackluster quality of instruction in my high school art program, I decided to enroll in a life drawing class at the Madison Area Technical College.

I somehow managed to sweet talk my mom into letting me borrow her car, which doubled as her delivery vehicle for her home-based floral business, so this was a huge sacrifice on her part – thanks, Mom! And so it began: twice a week I drove a half hour south from my hometown in Wisconsin and began to study with my first influential art instructor, Robert Schultz. His highly detailed and stylized graphite drawings immediately awed me and I continued to study with him off and on over the course of a decade.

During those years developing my figure drawing skills, the most important thing that I picked up was the importance of the "little things." In figure drawing, being off in the placement of an eye or a nose by just a fraction of an inch can make all of the difference in whether or not an artist truly captures a likeness of his subject. Similarly, the "swing" of a line (As Mr. Schultz liked say), either captured the nuance of a pose or it did not. I learned to really study subtleties before I made any marks on my drawing. In fact, I blame my early passion about figure drawing for why I am now horrible with remembering people's names. When I first meet someone new, I usually miss his or her name during our introduction because I'm busy studying the person's features and appearance....How far apart are his eyes? How long are his arms? Etc.

The second instance in which the importance of observing detail was impressed upon me was when I worked at Walt Disney Feature Animation. I worked as a Color Stylist, which meant that I worked as part of a small team of artists who set the color of the special effects, backgrounds, and characters within the movie. While working on the movie Mulan, we often had to meet tight film production deadlines and while I always made my best effort, I quickly realized one ironic truth: If I ever cut a corner on some detail or hustled through something to get it done in time for the directors' walk through, then it inevitably became the very first thing that would be singled out with a furrowed brow and a question like, "What's going on here with this character's socks?" or "What's happening here with the color on the inside of this character's mouth?"

I soon realized that anything that felt queasy to me would immediately be seized upon by their sharp eyes. Over time I got better at my job and learned to recognize potential snafus well ahead of time. But it was yet another lesson in looking closely and in really seeing what was in front of me.

Both of these anecdotes are leading to a larger point that is the true purpose of this diary entry: It's now nearly the midpoint of the first month of this new year and I am still wondering where winter is.

Yes, I know that our friends out west have had all of the winter that they can take this year, but here in the east, it's been freakishly mild. I am an avid gardener, and during a stretch of near 60-degree weather in December here in central Pennsylvania, my irises and other bulbs began to emerge. On top of this, I've noticed trees budding and normally dormant perennials showing signs of green this month. It doesn't take superhuman powers of observation to realize that this is not right, but I wonder if others are as troubled by these things as I am.

What seems even more "wrong" to me is a series of recent and disturbing headlines that I've noticed in our media, coincident with my observations here locally:

• September, 2006 - NASA and NOAA Announce Ozone Hole is a Double Record Breaker
• December 15, 2006 – New National Arbor Day Foundation Hardiness Zone Map reflects warmer climate
• December 27, 2006 - Interior Secretary Kempthorne Announces Proposal to List Polar Bears as Threatened Under Endangered Species Act
• January 4, 2007 - Ancient Ice Sheet Breaks Free from Canadian Arctic
  

Am I hysterical? Do I think that we're all going to bake to death because of global warming? Am I one of those goofy environmentalists?

Perhaps.

You see, I am a very fortunate individual who works for a living at something that I truly love, making art. I frequently take my easel out to the state parks here in central Pennsylvania. During those times, I see a lot while working in the field. For example, last year we had another mild winter here in the east and it afforded me the opportunity to finish plein air paintings up in Black Moshannon State Park during the winter months of January and February. There were even insects flying around my easel while I worked in February. Again, this seems all wrong to me.

Black Moshannon, No. 12 This remains one of my favorite plein air paintings to date because it was painted during the month of January 2006, when I took advantage of an unusually mild stretch of weather to get out and do some field work.

And while I don't believe that we're all going to immediately bake to death, I do think that there are many troubling climate extremes occurring throughout our world. Whether one references the lack of snow in Moscow or on European ski slopes, a lot of people are experiencing an unusually mild winter this year. And one theory about the consequences of global warming is that it will lead to extremes beyond just warmer temperatures: More severe floods, longer droughts, more powerful storms, etc.

As the magazine Business Week points out, at least corporations are beginning to acknowledge what can be seen all around us, "This was the year global warming went from controversial to conventional for much of the corporate world." Maybe it isn’t all bad. I know that I’ve certainly enjoyed my extended mountain bike riding season this year and I believe that good old American entrepreneurship will help blunt some of the problems that may arise in the near future.

But I wonder if people see what I see. I also wonder about what people hear when political pollsters counsel elected figures to use the term "climate change" because – as they tell the pols – the term "global warming" incites too much hysteria. Indeed, it's tough to know who to trust for factual information, as "60 Minutes" pointed out in a report last year "Rewriting The Science: Scientist Says Politicians Edit Global Warming Research."

Whatever the rhetoric, I will keep my artist eyes open.