Marie H. Becker
Marie H. Becker paints with an edgy sense of humour. Acute insight into environmental detriment surprisingly juxtaposed by a bright-coloured splash of belief that everything alive shares a unifying commonality.
My art is motivated by the joyful life force in plants and animals. At the same time this energy creates a paradox. Much of the natural urge we human animals have for Progress has a dark under-side that causes damage to the earth and all that lives here.
Awakened to this flaw in our own nature, we begin to address the trouble—finding creative ways to protect forests, waterways, endangered species (and ultimately ourselves).
My work uses allegory, realism, and a touch of the supernatural with subject matter ranging from larger than life flowers, playful moths and birds, to rabbit park community landscapes. Color is essential in creating the mood and message of my work. I paint with oil on board and canvas, or as in the smaller paintings with a variety of media including acrylic and collage.
Past Exhibitions
About the Artist
Recently I have been spending time with a group of people who support and maintain the Ernest Becker Foundation. The Foundation was created by Neil Elgee, MD. in 1993. The mission of EBF broadly stated is to encourage dialogue on suffering, evil, and the human condition, drawing on Ernest Becker’s works of psychological anthropology including Denial of Death and Escape from Evil.
Contact with this Beckerian community through their educational programs has influenced me to try and describe some of the inquiries and experiences from certain sessions through a portion of my artwork. The appearance of death, the fear of it haunts us like nothing else. Striving to transcend our mortality fears and be a part of something eternal we create immortality projects and hero systems to camouflage what we can’t face and in the process learn to live with evil, dissonance, and contradiction.
The EBF fosters an examination of how we can discover new possibilities of choice and action and new forms of courage and endurance as a way to optimal living.
A popular example of another artist who dramatically throws the truth of the Life Cycle full in his audience’s face is Damien Hirst. Hirst is drawn to the painful subject of death and intuitively he knows we will follow him because we both fear and are fascinated by the complex symbol of Death.
-Marie H. Becker
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