An homage to Picasso’s anti-war painting, Guernica, Travis London’s Guernica Pass is also an anti-war painting. The war depicted in Guernica Pass is industrial civilization’s war against the natural world, a war industrial civilization is currently winning. We see an agonized Mother Earth holding her dead sagebrush child; the injured and suffering pronghorn antelope; coyote as witness to the violence and obliterated innocence.
We also see the perseverance of the people — the fierce burrowing owl people, the strong sage-grouse people, the fresh activists ready to take the place of the activists just struck down, with the snowflake people and the star people and the sun and moon lighting the way.
Picasso painted Guernica in 1937 to depict the fight against fascism and war at a time when a civil war in his own country of Spain had broken out and the world was on the cusp of World War II.
Travis paints Guernica Pass in 2021 to depict the fight against the ravages of industrial civilization. One ongoing war against the natural world has been waged by fossil fuel corporations and their enablers for over 250 years. Another war is about to unfold: the war that’s colored “green”, the one that most people don’t even realize is a war yet. Don’t be fooled by the purveyors of this new war, those who come dressed in neo-liberalism and high tech solutions. They are the ones we fight against, with the coyote, the sagebrush, the burrowing owl, the sage-grouse, and the antelope. Stand with our brother sun and sister moon to light the way.
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