GUY WARREN
"Rainforest Blues"

oil and acrylic
on canvas
274x275cm

Reproduction courtesy of the artist.

"Rainforest Blues" stands as one of the major pieces in the University Art Collection. Massive in scale "Rainforest Blues" encapsulates one of the major concerns in Warren's work, the link between people and the natural environment and the idea of the earth as a living system or "Gaia".

The basic tenet of Gaia is "that life on earth is part of an interlocking, interconnected system that binds the atmosphere to the continents and oceans in a quasi-physiological process....life forms have co-evolved with their environment in such a way that environmental conditions are held steady in the face of a continual flux of energy and matter. Gaia is a theory of stability and is therefore paramount to viewing the planet as a remarkably robust geophysiological system." *

Warren's work "Gaia" manifests itself as a concept by enmeshing people within the rainforest landscape rather than outside it. Some of this may come from Warren's interest in indigenous art but also through concepts of western abstraction and the abstract expressionist idea of painting as an environment or arena for contemplation. To take this further in the 1970's Warren began to wrap the model in the canvas itself and to paint on the wrapped body in order to ensure that the canvas ceased to be merely a neutral ground on which the image sat. The image thus created was the inevitable outcome of all the elements - the body, the canvas, the paint, the process - all making an equal contribution. The other important component to this work is the relation of the rainforest as an encapsulating environment and Warren's experience of the rainforest during his time as a serviceman in Papua New Guinea during World War II.

In recent years the concept of "Gaia" has been adopted by the environmental movement as the "Mother Earth" ideal, and indeed in a work like "Rainforest Blues" there are elements of this, the large central female figure for example. But although containing these sorts of elements, Warren's use of Gaia is connected more to the rigorous investigation of the idea as a valid scientific model that supports and enhances the ideas espoused through Darwinism, rather than as a new age philosophy.

The title is also a play on Warren's environmental concerns. "Blues" could be a reference to the blues used in the picture itself but also "got the blues" over environmental destruction.

* Banyard, P (Editor), Gaia in Action, Floris Books, Edinburgh, 1996.