After a long career as a landscape painter, Jolene Powell’s current body of work explores all aspects of the subject she has alluded to her entire career: the spiritual, political, magical, and beautiful. In 2025, she sees any person working with the landscape as a documentarian and political artist, for nature is ever-changing at the hands of humans. The places where we find respite and inspiration are affected by storms, overpopulation, deforestation, and other environmental, climate change issues. Since her first landscape paintings, she has always selected places directly touched by climate change and/or places with active programs to minimize human impact on the environment.
Rocks are a metaphor for the fixed and rigid. The fixed, immovable problem of climate change that has been scientifically proven again and again but still isn’t widely accepted by voters and lawmakers. We are moving too slowly to instigate true change as seen in places like the Great Lakes that have experienced flooding, drought, and harmful algae blooms. Powell believes we are too late, past the precipice, that if we immediately stopped everything that causes greenhouse gases to heat our environment the momentum of climate change would not end: the fixed and the rigid, the immovable, and heavy.
The artist chooses not to visually catastrophize the landscape, but to honor its fragility with representations of beauty, for that is what connects our human experiences. Beauty is universal, and for her, indicative of the spiritual. “If the moon rises and sets, I will set intentions and express gratitude for the guidance it has provided not just me but many humans across spiritual paths for millennia.” - Jolene Powell