A painting of a snow leopard camouflaged by falling snow prowls through a canyon in Afghanistan, his species’ existence on the planet nearly at an end. This painting I did for the series Good Leaders, Endangered Species, Ships at Sea, at Derek Eller gallery in NYC in November 2008, during the time of the first election of President Barak Obama. I had felt that we needed “good leaders,” as they were like an “endangered species” in a world (and nation!) that was like a “ship at sea”! Just before the election that fateful year, I had a portrait of Obama, with his arms crossed, smiling confidently in front of the Capitol when he was still a senator—an image that I also used for the poster for the show (I always feel that your show begins with the poster!). Although you would hope that the art world was mostly “super-lefty liberal,” there were collectors who called Derek and demanded that their name be taken off the mailing list “forever” as they were McCain supporters!

In any event, my hope that is even conservative people could realize that we need to save the endangered species of animals on this planet for the future—and if we can all rally around this notion, perhaps then, too, we can open up the conversation for ending global warming and the exploitation of nature, for future generations of people and so we can healthily survive as people and earth and everything upon it—optimistic, I know, but it seems so obvious!

I love snow leopards and would visit them (often when I took my students there to draw!) at the Central Park Zoo. Of course, this is one of the few left in the wild, from one of the Attenborough BBC documentaries, with some of the only footage of this rarest of the Himalayan animals. Their camouflage is so acute, and when it is snowing, they almost disappear into the background.  When I paint from photos, I like to paint as if all the distortions, lens flare, etc. are “real,” and paint through the glitches and out of focus imagery trying to gleam from it the abstractions, allowing my subconscious to come through like Cézanne painted his mountains. Here, in a freeze-frame shot from the documentary, the snow falling seems like otherworldly pods, the steep rocky edifice of the cliff behind the leopard is also so complicated, all fuse together to open into dreamlike other worlds—I love how paintings, even of Cézanne’s rocks can transcend into unconscious projections of the inner mind and hope the same does here.

Our world is more in peril than ever, I hope we aren’t the snow leopards of the universe, lost in our hubris without realizing our days are numbered due to our exploitation of the planet. If there is a heaven, perhaps it is in the spirit of nature, something I hope to capture in all my works, but especially in this image, where the snow leopard is about itself, but also an avatar for the plight of humankind and all things living on our sublime planet.