Angst Artist Bud Root-Michels | The Last One | Acrylic Painting

Since 1974 Bud witnessed Global-warming speed up in Alaska. He walked the Arctic Ocean pack ice. One summer he heard Barter Island sirens when polar bears entered the village to forage for food. Residents shut their doors until the bears passed. Today pack ice melts. Killer whales are moving north to hunt the Polar Bears- seals and may soon become the dominant species. Already Polar bears descend jagged cliffs to hunt bird eggs instead of seals. Bud now lives in Santa Fe’s High Senora Dessert. People talk of drought, table water receding, and wells being re-drilled deeper and deeper.

Why this painting? Why the ice cube? As a wildlife illustrator, Bud paints animals in their natural habitat. The Polar Bear’s pack ice habitat is melting into open flows with vast distances between chucks of ice that hide the seals they hunt. Global Warming is an undeniable reality that affects all of us. Some still deny the undeniable. Bud feels it is urgent to communicate with his art what is happening to our world and the world of future generations. It alarms him. In painting this bear he presents the inevitable if we do not reverse this deadly trend.

Before starting his acrylic paintings, Bud researches his subject matter carefully. Textures fascinate him and are his signature along with color theory, contrast, and strong graphic design. As a political cartoonist for two major newspapers, Bud presented ideas in a poignant and graphically strong first glance look. What you see in this Polar Bear is “The Last One” watching the melt of the last piece of ice on the parched earth with a bleak sky behind it.

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