Loomings

Loomings is a series of paintings combining tar, oil paint, and occasionally gold leaf. Named after the first chapter in Melville’s Moby-Dick, each painting’s title references the novel’s sense of the “inscrutable” and Melville’s apocalyptic vision of the American quest.

The tar, a fossil-fuel byproduct, functions as a monochromatic signifier of industrialism, particularly reckless over-extraction. Recalling that whale oil was the precursor to petroleum, the titles’ quotations from Moby-Dick and the tar’s metallic blacks and tintype sepia tones invoke Melville’s novel as a cautionary, foundational myth for our own age of accelerating climate disruption and social discord.