Planetarian or
Environmental Artwork
Part 1 -

Copyright © 2011, 2012 by Craig Carlton Dremann, both text and images.

P.O. Box 361, Redwood City, CA 94064 - (650) 325-7333 - email

Part 2 at www.ecoseeds.com/art2.html

Part 3 at www.ecoseeds.com/art3.html

Part 4 at www.ecoseeds.com/art4.html

Part 5 at www.ecoseeds.com/art5.html


Earthrise
Digital image of moon and Earth, with new text by Craig Dremann,
title: "You are here".

PLANETARIAN ARTWORK is a new form of artistic expression, where the image tells a story about local natural ecosystems or the planetary environment, and the title of the image explains that story, as shown below. These stories are to express the concept of "Whole Planet Awareness" or in the French language, "Conscience Planète Entière."


Potentilla hickmanii

Title: "Potentilla hickmanii 8X being protected in Montara, San Mateo County by a dwarf Coyote bush, from the European weed grasses like Holcus and Rattlesnake grass, when it should be surrounded by native needlegrasses, Danthonia, Indian Paintbrushes and other wildflowers."

Size 10" x 10" acrylic on canvas. Painting #1 in catalogue. Copyright image and text © 2011 by Craig Carlton Dremann, all right reserved.



Potentilla hickmanii

Title: "Potentilla hickmanii -- 7x trying to survive in a thatch of allelopathic European grasses, being helped to produce seed by a local native wasp pollinator in San Mateo County, Montara Mountain."

Size 8" x 8" acrylic and pencil on canvas. Painting #2 in catalogue. Copyright image and text © 2011 by Craig Carlton Dremann, all right reserved.


Marina, California

Title [525 words]: "MARINA, CALIFORNIA, SUMMER 2011, Del Monte Blvd. exit off Highway One, that can be read like chapters in a book, beginning with the ocean at the distance, that is behind the sand dunes covered with native vegetation,

then you see a thin line of the green of native trees and coyote bush shrubs including the dwarf 10-15 foot tall live oaks that grow in pure sand at the Salinas River Wildlife Refuge,

then the plowed field where the native grasses grew for a million years, whose phytoliths and sequestered carbon and generous organic material are the only evidence that they ever existed--like pottery shards showing where an Indian village existed before it was wiped out by the European genocide--

and this beautiful rich soil was originally owned by the Del Monte Corporation, now by Dole, plowed to grow crops that need this cool summer climate, like lettuce, artichokes and Brussels sprouts,

and then you see a line of native coyote bushes that used to be a part of the oak woodland and grassland habitat that covered the area, and then you see the sand that was moved from the dunes and piled into a hill to make the Highway One exit interchange,

and planted with the South African iceplant instead of any local native plants to stabilize the sand--called 'Dead man's fingers' for the upright finger-like leaves in reds and greens forming a solid mat of vegetation that does not allowing native plants or animals to survive and is frequently herbicided to keep it pure--

then you see the sand area where the iceplant has not been planted, where the coyote bushes are growing back, and the Heterotheca plants with their yellow flowers grow, and the burrowing mammals are found amongst the native mosses growing here and there,

and the coyote bushes and the Heterotheca plants are the two species that remain, despite all our attempts to wipe out the California native grassland ecosystem off the land, with nearly 100% success so far, and these two species survive despite everything we have done to destroy them,

and you could call them sacred plants, in having the power to survive our species' 250 year long ecological hurricane that we unleashed on the native plants, animals, and indigenous men, women and children in California,

and it is a pity that we did not leave some small example of these native grasslands for future generations, so they could appreciate the millions of years of soil building that the native bunchgrasses did for us, generously sequestering their carbon and organic matter, so we could have beautiful ag. lands to grow our crops in, and building our wealth upon their graves,

so perhaps we could preserve areas like this around the State and restore them by replanting their original native grassland species, and do it on a significant scale, like 600 places of 100 acres each, located every 15 miles throughout California,

to restore and preserve at least one acre for every 1,400 we have taken for our own uses, and in appreciation for all that the native grasses have done for our species."

Size 10" x 20" Acrylic on canvas. Painting #3 in catalogue. Copyright image and text © 2011 by Craig Carlton Dremann
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Potentilla hickmanii

TITLE [1,000 words] : "Potentilla hickmanii plant, one of the rarest plants in the world, in October 2011, overlooking the ocean in Montara, California and growing only two inches tall, related to the strawberry, growing at the edge of a gopher mound,

a member of Population No. 3, one of the last of 300 of its kind on the planet, which has been growing on a block of granite located on the Pacific tectonic plate, that has been moving northward by the movement of the San Andreas fault, and now relocated hundreds of miles from its original position in Southern California,

growing with other grassland species like Golden Aster and Indian Paintbrushes, and scattered dwarf coyote bushes laying prostrate only four inches tall, and intimately among coastal dwarf ecotypes of California native bunchgrasses, that produced the few inches of soil on top of the granite rock base on the narrow mountain grassland covered ridges surrounded by dense shrub cover,

and only three years earlier, this population numbered over 1,000 individuals, but weeds like the Holcus grass and Queen Anne's Lace and Rattlesnake grass invaded 90% of their land, and Jake Lavinghouse did the Herculean effort in 2011 to hand-weed the remaining 1/10th acre of Hickmanii habitat, with the hopes that once released from European weeds, the bunchgrasses and Hickmaniis could recover and increase,

and you can see the Gulf Fritillary or Passion butterfly on the thistles, an exotic from the Deep South whose caterpillars are entirely dependent on passionflower plants growing in people's gardens and got permanently established about 50 years ago,

and then you see the coyote bushes on the slope, and then the strip of European annual grasses and weeds with some coyote bushes recolonizing that area,

and some willow bushes in the creek bed which was probably an ancient Indian village site 200 years ago and the willow were used to construct their baskets, homes and sweat lodges, and further down the coast at Gazos Creek, the Portola Expedition on October 23, 1769 saw a domed structure large enough to hold 200 people,

and at least 25,000 Indians lived along the central California coast in pre-European times, and just like the Hickmaniis, when the Europeans invaded, the native American populations experienced a decline of over 90% of their original numbers, and for somewhat the same reasons, in that they did not get a large piece of land to live that was exclusively their own, where they could live unmolested,

and the tribe on this site was called RAMAY and had lived here for over 1,500 years and there are descendants alive today that never got paid for the lands taken away from them during the European invasion,

and the Hickmaniis probably heard for centuries, the sounds of the bird-bone flutes and the split-stick rattles made out of California laurel wood, and the strumming of the bow in accompaniment with the songs, and overheard the stories of the mythologies, like the Duck Hawk, the grandson of the Coyote, who made the Earth a safe place for humans to live, and the Coyote trickster;

and then in the painting you see the thistles behind the willows and those areas have the exotic perennial six-foot-tall Harding grass that was introduced by the US Department of Agriculture that is a horrible ecological mistake, taking over huge areas of coastal California because the animals know not to eat it because it contains a psychedelic chemical 5-methoxy DMT so there are no predators to keep it in check

and it is like letting out a horrible evil genie out of the bottle, that causes spatial extinction of the native ecosystem of the area that it invades, and this plant has killed the four other Hickmanii populations on the next ridge to the north, eliminating more than half of the total population of what is left of the Hickmaniis,

and then there is a thin line of the native coyote bushes on the edge of the field of Brussels sprouts, that are growing in the deep, rich agriculture soils that was produced by tens of thousands of years of the native perennial bunchgrasses creating Molisols with their leaves and roots,

and the Brussels sprouts are at the end of a long line of plant mutations that started with the Romans with kale, turning that plant into cabbage with the leaves rolled up into a ball, then broccoli, and forced the stems to swell up to produce kohlrabi, and creating cauliflower, and ending with the twisting of each leaf into a tiny ball to produce Brussels sprouts, that can only be grown along the California cool summer coastal climate,

and then the painting shows another thin line of coyote bushes along the edge of the California Highway One, and 25 years ago, there was a plan to build a new four lane freeway to bypass the cliffs at Devils Slide,

and the Hickmanii populations were found when the route had a botanical survey, and instead of only one population of a dozen plants Hickmaniis known to grow at Pebble Beach in Monterey County, over 2,000 plants at Montara were also found, but neither populations protected from the invasion of exotic plants,

and then between the highway and the ocean, you see the uncultivated part of the coastal bluff bunchgrass lands that are now mostly weeds, but there could still be some wildflowers, like the coastal yellow Evening primrose that grows along the roadside nearby, and this bluff was either grazed or cut for hay in the past,

then you see the shoreline and beyond all of the water brought to the planet by the comets, which we call the ocean, with the same minerals as our blood, as we have a little bit of the ocean inside of all of us,

and then the clouds and the atmosphere, that keeps us warm and moist, instead of the vacuum and the near Absolute Zero temperatures of outer space."

Size 12" x 36" acrylic and pen on canvas. Painting #4 in catalogue. Copyright image and text © 2011 by Craig Carlton Dremann, all right reserved.


Earth and Moon

Title: "Living planet - magma of the earth with plants on its cooled surface producing food and oxygen, with the lonely moon looking."

Digital image 8" x 9.7" originally painted on a ceramic bowl, Febuary 2002, Copyright 2011 by Craig Carlton Dremann.



Desert stipa

Title: "Six miles south of Palmdale, on September 27, 2000 at noon a California native Harvester ant finds the coolest Mojave soil temperature underneath the perennial native Desert Stipa grass plant"

Temperatures are in Fahrenheit ± one degree, measured 0.25" (6 mm) below the soil's surface. Grid is in inches. The plant's diameter is nine inches by eight inches, and the cooling effect of this single plant includes the dense shade cast upon the desert's surface.

If the shade temperature at noon is 90°F, the top inch of bare soil can be 126°F versus 88°F when only one small perennial native grass plant is growing. The Mojave's Desert Stipa of the Californian desert (Achnantherum speciosum), shows nearly a 40 degree difference in surface temperature.

The artist is suggesting at https://www.ecoseed.com/cool.html that by replanting the native perennial grasses in the desert regions of the planet, we could help cool the planet's surface and atmosphere, thereby counteracting the effects of global warming. .

Digital image 8.3"x 8.3". Copyright © 2000 by Craig C. Dremann.



Planetarian art

Title: "Instructions for a Planet--Do not allow your domesticated grazing animals eat all of the grass and wildflowers and spew methane into the atmosphere, and do not catch all the fish in the rivers and oceans, and do not cut down all of the trees, and do not have any nuclear missles or bombs, and no nuclear power either, and do not pull out the rivits that hold the planet together, and sell them on Ebay."

Acrylic and permanent marker on canvas, 8" x 8" Painting #5 in catalogue. Copyright image and text © 2011 by Craig Carlton Dremann, all right reserved.


Black cat

Title: "Black cat in a coal mine at midnight, where sixty percent of abandoned coal mines in the United States can be found in just three states: West Virginia, Pennsylvania, and Kentucky and most are located on State-owned land, notorious safety and environmental hazards, venting methane or even catching fire underground, like in the town of Centralia, PA, and impacting on watersheds, and are part of the 500,000 abandoned mines across the USA."

Acrylics on canvas board, 5" x 7" Background is a matt black and cat has some gloss black so you can see outline. Eyes are metallic Incan gold, to make them reflective. Painting #6 in catalogue. Copyright image and text © 2011 by Craig Carlton Dremann, all right reserved.



Big Tall Wish

Title: "BIG TALL WISH--the title for this painting comes from the original Twilight Zone TV series, Season one, from the episode of the same name that first aired on April 8, 1960 and written by Rod Serling,

and MY Big Tall Wish is ONE BILLION ACRES of hot barren arid lands and desert lands worldwide, be set aside as permanent ECOLOGICAL RESTORATION PRESERVES, and revegetated with local native perennial grasses and local trees, to lower the planet's temperature--

for example when barren desert soils are insulated by grasses and trees, then the sun's heat cannot be stored by the barren land to heat up the atmosphere, and a single grass plant with its shade and insulation can lower the soil surface temperature from 128 degrees F. down to 88 degrees F.

and replanting the local native vegetation can lower the atmospheric dust that blows off the barren lands and keeps clouds from forming, and it will be discovered in the future that atmospheric dust is the most powerful weather modifier and desertification force on the planet,

and replanting the vegetation can quickly increase the annual rainfall to those areas, and the perennial grass roots can start the process of sequestering some of the our wasted 5.5 billion annual metric tons of atmospheric carbon into the desert soils,

and once that carbon is put back in those areas, it can be safely stored away for thousands of years, and since this planet is the only home in the universe for us, each ounce of soil is worth its weight in gold, and every drop of water is worth its weight in silver, for all of the life forms that exist here. "

Acrylics on canvas, 6" x 12" Painting #7 in catalogue. Copyright image and text © 2011 by Craig Carlton Dremann, all right reserved.



Layia flowers

Title: "Twisselman Road Layia wildflowers, Kern County, San Joaquin valley, one of the last stands of the wildflowers that John Muir saw in 1868, that he wrote about in The Mountains of California in the last chapter,

'The Great Plain of California...was one smooth continuous bed of [wildflowers} so marvelously rich, that in walking from one end of it to the other, a distance of more than 400 miles, your foot would press about a hundred flowers at every step.'

Our generation is the Bookends of Muir, where we see the end of an entire ecosystem, and we need to permanently preserve examples of what little is left of the bunchgrasses and wildflower fields, for the future generations."

Acrylics and pencil on canvas, 8" x 10" Painting #8 in catalogue. Copyright image and text © 2011 by Craig Carlton Dremann, all right reserved.


Cow in poppies

Title: "THE EVIL DESTROYERS OF WORLDS, the horned and woolly land ticks with their mouth parts always attached to our native grasslands, with tens of millions of them 99.99% destroying California's wildflower and perennial native bunchgrasses in less than 100 years,

and spreading through their dropping, the taller and very flammable annual European grasses like the wild oats, and ripgut grass, foxtails, soft chess and rat tail fescue, which caused spatial extinction of nearly an entire ecosystem that had existed for millions of years, and we should set aside and permanently preserve as many examples as possible, of the wildflower fields and bunchgrasses that are left."

Acrylics on canvas, 8" x 10" Painting #9 in catalogue. Copyright image and text © 2011 by Craig Carlton Dremann, all right reserved.



Russian Ridge Preserve Open Space wildflowers

Title: RUSSIAN RIDGE PRESERVE in the San Francisco Bay area, with Anthropocene Era environmental damages at 37.3236 Lat. and 122.205 W Long.,

and it may be very difficult to see what is wrong with this picture, because it shows what looks like a nice green field on May 13, 2011 on a public preserve,

but it shows the current state of ruin of a grassland ecosystem after a 200+ year environmental hurricane that has been hitting California since 1769, and this hillside prior to 1996 was part of the best remaining examples of wildflower fields in Northern California for 250 miles in all directions,

and during this date in spring, this painting should be showing a solid, never-ending riot of wildflower colors to the horizon, but negligent management of this site has killed them and will eventually cost thousands of ounces of pure gold to do the necessary mitigation and ecological restoration of the site to repair the damages from the five illegal burns conducted there without any vegetation monitoring,
and the only evidence of natives in the picture are the 3-6 foot tall coyote bushes on the hill, and the solid green color of the field are all the weeds brought from Europe that now cover the land and turn brown in summer, like the wild oats, Italian thistle, Yellow star thistle, and on the other side of the hill, there is a solid ocean of the weed Harding grass,

but there may be a happy-ending to this story, in that once the weeds are managed, there are likely to be dormant native seeds still in the soil, that can sprout and grow again, to produce the fantastic wildflower displays with their wonderful scents and spectacular colors, that used to occur every spring all over California, for tens of millions of years.

Acrylics on canvas, 8" x 10" Painting #10 in catalogue. Copyright image and text © 2011 by Craig Carlton Dremann, all right reserved.
More information about ecological restoration of the wildflowers and native grasses of this preserve can be found at https://www.ecoseeds.com/invent.html



Arastradero preserve

Title: "ARASTRADERO PRESERVE choosing a new path of health, after over 200 years of going down the wrong path of the destruction of California grasslands at 37.39N Lat and 122.175W Long.,

and there is currently little awareness of the environmental damages, because it is difficult to see what is wrong with this picture--

especially when it shows an seemingly idyllic green hillside in a public preserve in the hills of Palo Alto on April 29, 2011--but it is the sad remains of a ruined native grassland that should be a solid hillside of flowers and native bunchgrasses this time of year,

and the ruins extend deep into the soil level, where the soil potassium was so completely removed by the cows and sheep grazing, that only weeds like medusahead and Italian thistle can grow in places in the nutrient-poor, depauperate soils,

and in the distance to the left, you can see a line of native live oaks, but in the middle distance, is a line of introduced Australian eucalyptus trees near the western border of Stanford University,

and the 70 acres in this picture will need all the weeds managed, that currently sprout at the rate of 30 seedlings per square inch, and adequate potassium put back into the soil, that is needed by each species of the native seedlings that once grew there,

and the local native seeds replanted, like the sun-loving bunchgrasses such as Melica, Stipa, Squirreltail, Western Fescue and the Danthonia grasses and the mosaics of wildflowers replanted, and it will cost at least a few thousand ounces of pure gold,

and once we start on this new path, we will change geologic history away from the destructive Anthropocene Era, to an environmentally-aware Anthropocene Era, and you will be able to see the change in the geologic soil layers,

and you can see on the far right, a single native buckeye tree that was recently planted, to start the process."

Acrylics on canvas, 12" x 36" Painting #11 in catalogue. Copyright image and text © 2011 by Craig Carlton Dremann, all right reserved.


Duality disease

Title: "One cure for the Duality-Disease, whose symptoms are expressed when a human culture has limited its options to only two choices, like Good or Evil, or Black and White,

and this picture shows that there are more possibilities, like the potential colors on the hills at Camp Roberts in California on the east side of US highway 101 at N 35.85 Lat. and W 120.75 Long., with the riparian forest in the foreground along the Salinas River,

and this image could also be considered the 'Before' picture of the solid native wildflowers that originally covered the hills before 1769, and the 'After' picture of the European weed grasses that have completely replaced them, causing spatial extinction on those hills,

and since this area is the location of the lowest annual precipitation limits for the native oak trees that you see on the hills, they are having difficulty in reproducing amongst the exotic European grasses that desertify the soils in the summer, and the land has been worn down like an old coin and has lost its surface texture,

but there exists the possibility of replacing the weeds with the native California wildflowers and reclothe our favorite Planet with the original fabulous fabric of colors."

Acrylics on canvas, 8" x 10" Painting #12 in catalogue. Copyright image and text © 2011 by Craig Carlton Dremann, all right reserved.



Missing wildflowers

Title: "The Missing Wildflowers, where the evil European annual grasses now grow all over California, causing the spatial extinction of a whole native biome over tens of millions of acres, and we cannot pussy-foot around about what has been done, because it is a life-and-death issue,

and there is going to be a future conflict between the humans that have not yet developed any environmental consciousness, who want to rip the rivets out of what keeps the native ecosystems in place on the planet and destroyed them so completely, like the California wildflower fields, and make them into chachkalas and disposable consumer items in order to get from the rest of us, many Green-Frog Skins (like the Sioux Medicine person calls them in his book, Lame Deer, Seeker of Visions),

and the controversy will be between those who have developed an environmental consciousness of their surrounding, and are aware that we need to repair the damages to the desert and grassland ecosystems of our Favorite Planet, so we can avoid suffering the same fate as the missing wildflowers, and become a missing monotypic species ourselves on this planet."

Acrylics and pencil on canvas, 8" x 10" Painting #13 in catalogue. Copyright image and text © 2011 by Craig Carlton Dremann, all right reserved.



Alene Holdahl art

Provisional title: "Native sea oats from the south end of St. Simon's Island, Georgia, from N31.13 Lat. and W 81.41 Long. looking across St. Simon's sound to Jekyll Island of the left and the marshes of St. Simons Island to the right."

Oil on canvas, 7" x 20". Sea Oats painted, to look three dimensional on the canvas. Artist Alene Holdahl, 1917-1988. Date of painting unknown. Image copyright © the Estate of Alene Holdahl, all right reserved.




cartoon of stamps

Digital artwork, with the original stamp designs copyright © USPS.



Our Lady of the Sockeye

Title: "Our Lady of the Sockeye Salmon, (Oncorhynchus nerka) one population was listed by the Shoshone-Bannock Tribes of Idaho as an Endangered Species in 1991, when the runs which used to exceed one million fish or more, have decreased along the Columbia and Snake Rivers in Washington, Oregon and Idaho, when 90% of their habitat was lost, of their lake habitats, and by the blockage of their migration route by dams, irrigation diversions, and the Idaho Department of Fish and Game poisoning lakes to kill the sockeye and substitute trout; and the sockeye spawns in or near lakes, where the juveniles stay for 1 to 3 years before migrating to sea, and then when they are 4-8 years old, swim back upstream to spawn in the summer or fall, and both sexes turn brilliant to dark red on their backs and sides."

Acrylics, Correction pen and permanent marker on canvas, 9" x 12" Painting #14 in catalogue. Copyright image and text © 2012 by Craig Carlton Dremann, all right reserved.



Anasazi pottery shards

Title: "Postcard to the Missing Native American People--'WISH YOU WERE HERE!'--because in many places across the Americas and the Caribbean islands, only your pottery shards mark where your families made your homes for thousands of years,

and I personally apologize for the people who wiped out your ancestors and your ways of life right down to Ishi, and we need to take at least 10-25% of each State in America, and cede it back to the descendants of the original people and exempt it from property taxes,

and the pottery shards in this painting are part of the Southwest Anasazi story of a long drought, when the rain and snow ceased to fall regularly for many decades, and the people had to abandon their homes and were at the mercy of the weather,

and we believe that our modern cities of millions of people are immune to the same fate, but in arid California, Texas and the Southwest, we are living even closer to the environmental edge than the Anasazi ever did, considering the tremendous amount of energy expended to move water where it is needed, when water weighs 8.3 pounds for each gallon--

so that we can continue to thrive in these desert areas, we need to rethink our lifestyle to make it match our surroundings better, like get rid of all of the European grass lawns around our homes and stop growing rice or growing any crops with flood-irrigation for example, so that our pottery and other shards, do not end up being our only remains in places in the future

and I also apologize to the original Anasazi pottery artists, for my poor renditions of their wonderful pottery shard designs, which were painted much more skillfully than I can achieve myself."

Acrylics on canvas, 8" x 10" Painting #15 in catalogue. Copyright image and text © 2012 by Craig Carlton Dremann, all right reserved.



USA drought 2012

Title: "Are we, the tens of millions of people living in the Western States and Midwest, going to be the new Anasazi--caused by global warming and climate change, because a long term drought has begun?

Digital PNG image generated by the High Plains Regional Climate Center. Text copyright © 2012 by Craig Carlton Dremann, all right reserved. Image from https://www.hprcc.unl.edu/



Jackpot to Wells, NV

Title: "WELLS TO JACKPOT NEVADA, the Botanical Treasure Map, a portion of the 1997 mile-by-mile vegetation megatransect, where the species of native and exotic grass growing along the road, was recorded at each mile marker for over 2,000 miles, from Sacramento, California to South Dakota and back, and this image shows the plants growing along that stretch of US Highway 93--

and the Cheatgrass is an accidental introduction of a European annual weed grass, and Crested wheatgrass is a perennial European weed grass that was intentionally sown either by the highway department or by the Federal public lands managers, that causes spacial extinction of the local native ecosystems--

and the beautiful Great Basin wild rye prairie discovered during the survey, the very best example of native habitat along those 68 miles, is a sacred place because it survived despite all that we have done to wipe it off the face of the planet, and should be protected and preserved forever as such, and

Mile-by-Mile roadside vegetation megatransects should be conducted nationwide every ten years, in order to discover the remaining botanical treasures that are still in good condition in each State, so that they can be preserved for future generations. "

Digital image, 4" x 10". Data copyright ® 1997 and image copyright ® 2006 by Craig Carlton Dremann. More information on the megatransect and data is at https://www.ecoseeds.com/megatransect.html.


Leonid 2001

Title: "LEONID METEOR STORM the night of November 18-19 2001 as viewed in the Mojave desert, and the painting shows what you could see in two minutes time during its peak at 3;17 AM, when 16 meteors per minute fell, and a total of 2,075 were counted between midnight and 4 AM, with 15 falling between midnight and 1 AM, 380 between 1-2 AM, 720 between 2-3 AM and 960 between 3-4 AM, and this meteor shower is the result of the earth passing thought the debris field of the tail of the Tempel-Tuttle comet, with massive displays roughly every 33 years, producing the most spectacular meteor showers that a person will see in their lifetimes, falling in 1966, 1933, 1900, 1866, and the most spectacular storm occurred November 12-13 1833. "

Acrylics on canvas, 8" x 10" Painting #16 in catalogue. Copyright image and text © 2012 by Craig Carlton Dremann, all right reserved.



Antelope Valley vegetation

Title: "MOHAVE Natural Vegetation Treasure Map--Antelope Valley, 35N, 118W, part of the project that the artist completed, mapping the quality of the natural vegetation cover of 25 million acres of the California desert using USGS satellite infrared photgraphy, showing where the good quality native cover still exists, and also the areas that have the best potential to restore the native cover, plus map the farmlands, the western wooded edge and the ruined areas."

Acrylics on canvas, 8" x 10" Painting #17 in catalogue. Copyright image and text © 2012 by Craig Carlton Dremann, all right reserved.



Desert paradox

Title: "The PARADOX, where two boat docks are located in what looks like a desert, but within historic times, prior to the native perennial grasslands being stripped off the land by domesticated animals, every summer the monsoonal moisture would form clouds and rain to create rivers, marshes and lakes in areas which are so barren today, they are called The Empty Quarter, but contained the remains of a lake measuring 200 miles by 300 miles and at least 300 feet deep, and fortunately there is still a spot where the vegetation still exists in the mountains of Salalah, Oman, and the rains still come, and this suggests the possibility of bringing the summer rains back, by doing ecological restoration of the original local native vegetation."

Acrylics on canvas, 8" x 10" Painting #18 in catalogue. Copyright image and text © 2012 by Craig Carlton Dremann, all right reserved..



Joshua tree

Title: "JOSHUA TREE MAMA, a unique Yucca plant that only grows in the Mojave desert, looking like a tree growing to 40 feet tall, but is actually a giant relative of the lily family, and were once so common in pre-European times, that they formed forests in the desert so thick, that they were chopped for firewood and for fence posts by the miners and settlers, and this plant reproduces by the help of a moth that pollinates its flowers, in exchange for a few seeds that its larvae eat from the Joshua tree seed pods, and these plants have not been reproducing for years, and one reason could be that the areas where their seeds fall have been stripped of the native perennial grass understory that was grazed away by cattle and sheep, that used to protect the Joshua tree seedlings, and annual weeds from Europe and Arabia have grown in the place of the sheltering native grass plants, and perhaps the weedy annuals are interfering with the Joshua tree seedling survival, so this image shows the first time in decades, of a Joshua tree mother having two young children at her side, and her two children could be sprouts from her own roots, as the plant reproduces in that way also, and each plant can live for hundreds and perhaps a thousand years if protected. "

Acrylics on canvas, 8" x 10" Painting #19 in catalogue. Copyright image and text © 2012 by Craig Carlton Dremann, all right reserved.



Oman acacia

Title: "The ACACIA TREE in OMAN, helps bring back the summer rainfall, in part inspired by René Magritte's 1925-1927 "Oasis" painting, and my painting shows an actual Acacia tree plus the wadi or stream bed that exists next to that tree, growing in the Sultante of Oman, located exactly at the coordinates of 24.00 N, 57.00 E., and is from a photo taken by a member of the Confluence.org project, and what the suggestion is, that based on the summer monsoonal rainfall that falls on the natural vegetation in Salalah, Oman, that if other areas were replanted densely with their original perennial native grasses and local native trees like the Acacias, then cloud could form and rain again, and the streams and rivers flow again, perhaps across one billion acres of land that is currently barren deserts, from India westward to Morocco."

Acrylics on canvas, 8" x 10" Painting #20 in catalogue. Copyright image and text © 2012 by Craig Carlton Dremann, all right reserved.



Craig Carlton Dremann's new type of artwork
captures the underlying stories from the natural world, that the landscapes can tell us. Developed to increase our understanding of human and natural world interactions. The titles provide a unique vantage point to interprete the image in an entirely different way.

The titles guide us to become aware of the details and histories of the dynamic world we share, and our roles and responsibilities, and how we can make intentional positive changes by becoming aware.


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Updated December 20, 2022