Artist Jacob Meders

oil on canvas, gold leaf

approx. 16.5 x 11.5 inches

Fire Seed Water New Life is a meditation on how renewal - mental, emotional, physical, spiritual, and environmental - occurs through the interweaving of seasons and labor to care for others.

The mindset for this series began in the wake of the Camp Fire of 2018, when a faulty transmission line sparked a fire after a six-year drought in north central California where my paternal family resides. Many people evacuated their homes due to this massive wildfire, and the town of Chico where my sister lives became a new place of residence for these families. My sister Ali Knight Meders has worked for many years at Verbena Fields, California, overseeing controlled burns and regrowing the natural plant life in accord with California Native ancestral practices. On the one hand, I wonder, if more communities practiced some of these ancestral land practices, might we enjoy a healthier and safer ecosystem? Yet still, I am not naive to the realities of the unexpected: tragedies are such because there is often no deterring the confluence of multiple complex events.

In 2018, the year after my first son was born, I began painting a serape with thin acrylic layers, blending the paint into the rough textile to achieve the appearance of a scorched landscape filled with the promise of new plant life. This I did with thoughts of the fire at Paradise, California, one of the locations most affected by the Camp Fire. Several years later, my wife and I lost our second son shortly before his due date. The grief was devasting and tremendous, but so was the love for my family and the joy at seeing our first son continue to grow in heart, mind, body, and spirit. Our love deepened, and a year after the loss, I began developing the Maidu triangle basket pattern in oil and gold leaf on canvas, similarly layering colors to evoke the hues of sunset, dusk, new growth, campfire; the playful shades my son uses when he paints and draws his superheroes and imaginative creatures; and the powerful femininity of our California Native basket weavers, Indigenous women as mothers and creators, bringers of life. There is an ease to these paintings that comes from a return to my practice as an artist with a meaningful relationship to color and flow.

The triangle motif of these paintings abstracts Maidu basket patterns. The gold leaf signifies the disruption of the land and animal life resulting from the 1949 California gold rush. The paintings of Piet Mondrian (1872-1944) and Josef Albers (1988-1976) influence my patterning and color complements. It is worth noting that the Indigenous architecture of Mexico, South and Central America influenced Albers’ work. From the earth we are made, and to the earth we return.