Reflection

Reflection

I grew up slipping through a hole in a fence to a hidden pond where I first fell in love with nature - a place of fish, newts, and a great blue heron I used to sketch after school. Over the years, the pond dried, the summers burned hotter, and the heron disappeared. Only later did I understand how fragile these small worlds are, and how California’s droughts, polluted runoff, and vanishing wetlands mirror the erosion of our own health. In my painting, the girl in the yellow raincoat stands in the wreckage of a once-living place. The screens around her show artificial beauty - our attempt to mask environmental decline. She lifts the heron as a symbol of what we long to preserve, even as the ground crumbles beneath us. This work is my reminder that we can’t separate human well-being from the health of the world we keep trying not to see.