Exploring Climate Change Through Art With Last Chance To Paint
In March this year eInnovation News had a conversation with artist John Dyer. At the time John was just about to embark on his most ambitious project to date: Last Chance To Paint. Since then John has lead two expeditions to explore the impact of climate change on the people, plants and animals of the rainforest in the Amazon and Borneo.
Last Chance To Paint is inspired by a previous project called Spirit of the Rainforest. Here John painted with Amazon Indian Nixiwaka Yawanawa. As a fitting start to the latest project, chapter one of Last Chance To Paint is titled Spirit of the Rainforest 2. In this chapter John and the team visited Nixiwaka in the Amazon rainforest. Spending time with the Yawanawa tribe in the Acre region and learning how they live in harmony with the rainforest around them.
In chapter two, Last Chance To Paint: Person of the Forest, John and the team trekked into the rainforest once again. This time in Borneo, spending time with the Penan tribe and then travelling south to the Orangutan Foundation. Here the team explored how palm oil plantations are impacting on the environment. The time with the Penan tribe highlighted just how quickly a culture can be changed by environmental influence, with some of the youngest tribe members never having experienced the true hunter-gatherer existence of their elders. At the Orangutan Foundation, the team were up close and personal with climate change when forest fires used to clear areas of rainforest for farming caused them to leave the location early.
With more trips planned for the future, we caught up with John to hear how the project is progressing.
eInnovation News In Conversation With: John Dyer
What was it like when you arrived in the Amazon, were you excited that Last Chance To Paint was officially live or were you daunted by what you set out to accomplish?
Arriving in the Amazon was a very special moment for me. The last time I was in the Amazon rainforest was in 1989, much of the forest I explored then has now been felled for beef farming. So I do feel a real sense of urgency to not only experience places but to tell their story and connect others. It was a daunting prospect venturing that deep into the rainforest to live with the Yawanawá tribe. Doing this for the Last Chance To Paint project really inspired me and energised me as it provided a unique way for children to connect personally to the issues the rainforest and its people face.
I wish to accomplish a great deal and my sights are set very high so it can be daunting. Particularly when you are far from home and engaged with the expedition, knowing that if even one child or one school listens and follows, we have achieved something unique and special. Painting large canvases in the rainforest and dealing with the hierarchy of the tribe was daunting, but adrenaline and enthusiasm always gets me through. I have no predefined goals for each painting is they simply reflect the day and experience I have.
“Arriving in the Amazon was a very special moment for me”
Part of the appeal of the project is that schools who have signed up can travel ‘live’ with you via video and social media. Did you have to plan ahead for what to do if technology let you down or were you able to stay live for the duration of each chapter?
The ‘live’ element of Last Chance to Paint is the magic ingredient and one we hope will develop further in forthcoming chapters. I did have to plan ahead and we took two separate satellite systems with us in case one wouldn’t connect.
It was a struggle to get connectivity for our video satellite in the Amazon as there are only 4 satellites around the world that connect to it. The angle we had to point at kept clipping the rainforest canopy making for a weak signal. After a few days of very slowly uploading videos and the connection failing repeatedly we had burned £600 of airtime for only three 5 minute compressed video clips.
After this we had to resort to our second system that connects via a constellation of satellites but doesn’t allow for more than text based communication. I had all of this planned though and, with a few carefully edited emails with compressed images in, we could squeeze out an email to the Last Chance to Paint web site. The web site would recognise the email then format and publish it as a blog! That way we could receive messages from children and still answer them.
With a much bigger budget we could do more but the connectivity wasn’t the only issue. Power proved to be a bigger hurdle that we had anticipated due to us being in the rainforest for much of the day. Our solar panels didn’t have much time in the full sun to charge our kit. We had to be very disciplined with what equipment was used, some equipment was sacrificed to keep other bits of kit powered up.
iPad and Acrylic Paintings created for Last Chance To Paint: Person of the Forest
For each chapter so far you have created multiple paintings on an iPad as well as in traditional acrylic medium. Were there any specific challenges to your creative process in these remote locations?
There are always challenges when working in the field. These are multiplied when in very remote tropical areas, such as the Amazon and Borneo rainforests.
“I had to respect their wishes, culture and the spiritual subjects we were painting together”
My acrylic paints behave really well in the field, but the high humidity levels meant they didn’t dry very fast. I had to work wet on wet and even the following day the canvases were still wet and vulnerable. The subjects are not subjects I am very familiar with so when painting in the rainforest my eyes, brain and hand are working at an accelerated rate to try to work out and decode what I am seeing, searching to find the essence of my subject.
With the Yawanawá tribe I also had to respect their wishes, culture and the spiritual subjects we were painting together. It’s a bit like walking a tightrope and only on one occasion in the Amazon did I virtually fall off as I misinterpreted what I was painting which created a tension between myself and the tribe. This was quickly remedied the following day, but it was a reminder that Last Chance To Paint is a complex, unique and precious project that can only exist with the cooperation of very proud and remote peoples.
Using an iPad mini with Apple pencil and Procreate in the rainforests of the Amazon and Borneo was a whole new experience for me. A digital paint box and pad of paper all in one. It worked very well and allowed me to create new ‘paintings’ in the dark as it is pitch black by 6pm each day. Keeping the device charged was the biggest issue as there was only so much power to share between satellites links, cameras, iPhones, iPad, mics and more. I enjoyed using the iPad and the Procreate app so much that I took it to Borneo and it really came into its own there. It allowed me to draw, explore and get to grips with how to capture orangutans with a quick fluidity that would be hard achieve on canvas. In Borneo I was on the move all the time, in boats, walking, in caves, climbing canopy towers, meeting the Penan tribe etc. so it was great to use it a drawing book and also to pull up photos on so I could paint back at base camp.
Whilst spending time with the Yawanawá tribe in the Amazon, you ran a workshop with the children of the village. You also ran workshops with children in Borneo and, since returning, you have spent time running workshops with children from the UK. Were there any significant contrasts to working with children in each location? Do you think that where a child grows up makes a difference to their awareness of climate change?
Absolutely yes, there were real differences. The Yawanawá children in the Amazon already had a shared spiritual visual language that became very apparent when they started to paint. They worked very symbolically using key visual elements to describe their life and their connection to their rainforest. They all painted butterflies in the Yawanawá spiritual form rather than the actual form. The same was true of the boa constrictor snake. In fact all of the children included key spiritual images in their paintings just as Nixiwaka Yawanawá, the Amazon Indian artist I was painting alongside, does in his art. It was very interesting and all of the visual imagery they use is deeply connected to the forest and their Ayahuasca ceremonies.
The Penan tribe’s children in Borneo used to be nomadic and lived in very isolated small family groups in the rainforest. They do not use any form of plant based ‘medicines’ in ceremonies. They have been forcibly settled now into villages and converted to Christianity by missionaries. It was really clear to me that even though they painted their village and the rainforest and had a proud and strong connection to it, they didn’t have the strong visual link to it that the Yawanawá children do. Virtually all of the Penan children did feature rainforest trees in their paintings so the connection is still there.
“In the UK we have no predefined visual language so it became more technique led”
Back in the UK working with children from the UK at the Eden Project was different again. None of them had any connection to the plants or any real understanding of the relationship between plants, people, and animals, they all focused on the animals, which is really wonderful but very interesting too. In the UK we have no predefined visual language so it became more technique led. Once the children overcame their hesitancy to ‘risk’ making a painting or drawing, it worked really well with entire families joining in and spending hours working on Last Chance To Paint art together.
The Yawanawá children are the most aware of climate change issues as they live in the most unspoilt of the three areas. It’s interesting that the more urban the children are the less aware and connected they are to climate change and nature, I think this needs to change.
Smoke Covering the Sun at the Orangutan Foundation, Borneo and Orangutans at the centre
Inadvertently as part of this project, you have not only been raising awareness of climate change but have also experienced it first-hand. How did it feel when you had to leave Borneo early due to the forest fires in the area?
I never intended to put myself or the Last Chance to Paint team on the front line of climate change. But I guess the clue is in the name of the project, the subjects I am exploring are quite literally potentially a last chance to paint subject. I have to admit I found it hard to keep up my optimism as I experienced the devastation in Borneo. Clumps of burning rainforest fell out of the sky for the entire time we were with the orangutans. Once the air became so thick with smoke that we couldn’t easily see the sun, it was time to go.
Burning trees release huge amounts of toxins and heavy metals into the air so it is a very toxic place to be. The Last Chance To Paint team could leave but the orangutans couldn’t. I could wear a mask but the orangutans couldn’t. The Orangutan Foundation do their best and all of the orphaned orangutans are put on high doses of vitamins to help with the toxic air. When you know that in the last 20 years we have deforested 80% of the rainforest these ‘people of the forest’ live in, it is shocking.
If we keep buying products with palm oil in, it escalates the palm oil price and in the next dry season even more forest will burn. There are only about 5 years left at this rate and orangutans face imminent extinction. However this is exactly why Last Chance To Paint exists. To encourage young people to engage positively and gently with these difficult subjects, then hopefully they will tread as gently as they can as they grow.
“A team certainly adds up to more than the people in it”
Last Chance To Paint is all about educating future generations but we imagine that it has been a fantastic learning experience for you and the team as well. Is there anything that you or the team have learnt about yourselves, the environment or your creative processes that you would like to share with us?
The Last Chance To Paint team worked really well together and having the knowledge and mentoring of Robin Hanbury-Tenison, the 20th century greatest explorer, made a big difference to the first two chapters. There are always times when tiredness, illness, physical discomfort, lack of food, insects etc. can get the team or a member of the team down. What we learnt was to listen to each other and to not push things too hard. That was very apparent in the Yawanawá tribe as we couldn’t simply set off and paint until all the permissions from the tribal leaders had been gained. A team certainly adds up to more than the people in it and having art, music and exploration working together was a brilliant combination.
It was very interesting to see all of the problems we have: pollution, fossil fuel use, plastics, theft, money issues, health etc. appear even in remote tribal groups. There is a lot of commonality between us all. We really aren’t that different from each other.
I was a little sad to see how much the Penan have lost from being forcibly settled, but on the flip side the children now have huge possibilities for their future lives. Religion has been a corrosive force to both tribes but again they have adopted it and now run Christianity alongside their own traditions. At the end of the day we can’t wish for tribal people to be in ‘human zoos’ kept in a way that doesn’t allow for change but we really should never force them to change or to leave their land. Their future should only be in their hands but often it isn’t.
The Last Chance To Paint team, John Dyer at work and a workshop with children from the Penan tribe in Borneo
What are the next steps for the project; are any chapters confirmed for 2020?
The next chapter will be ‘Precious Africa’ where the team will be embedded with the Born Free Foundation in Kenya which will be amazing! There is no date set yet as we are still researching it. Hopefully in the new year we will have more information on that. So many of the iconic African species face extinction now and tribal people have really struggled to so there is a lot to explore and raise awareness about.
Do you ever see Last Chance To Paint coming to an end or are you concerned that there will always be a need for projects which raise awareness of environmental issues?
I see Last Chance To Paint as an ongoing project as long as we can find supportive sponsors to help us. There are so many subjects to explore and so little time left to do it. The race is on and creativity in schools is also really suffering so the project aims to address that too.
Join The Conversation on Climate Change: Subscribe To Last Chance To Paint
If you would like to enrol your school on the Last Chance To Paint adventure, sign up to receive updates at www.LastChanceToPaint.com. Get involved today by downloading the free teaching resources for Chapter One: Spirit of the Rainforest 2 and Chapter Two: Person of the Forest, available from the dedicated chapter pages. You can also follow Last Chance To Paint on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and YouTube.