Meet Marina Moevs | Artist – Painter

We had the good fortune of connecting with Marina Moevs and we’ve shared our conversation below.

Hi Marina, have there been any changes in how you think about work-life balance?
While categorized as work, I view my time in the studio and the activity of painting as an integral and necessary part of my life. It is the time I set aside for a sustained meditation on what it means to be alive (what is life?) what it means to be a human animal, on the interaction with our larger culture, and on the relationship to the planet and the natural world. The painting is the physical record of that thought process, and the act of painting can bring clarity to my thoughts. The painting can reveal to me what I am thinking about.

Can you open up a bit about your work and career? We’re big fans and we’d love for our community to learn more about your work.
I have been sounding the alarm about climate change since the late nineties. Unlike now, at that time hardly anyone talked about climate change. Making it the subject of my paintings was my small way to try to raise awareness of this existential issue. Over the years scientists and scholars have increased the urgency of their warnings, predicting an ever more dire future. Now some environmentalists working in the field of sustainability are even predicting the end of civilization as we know it within a few decades, due to climate change along with other stressors (Sixth Mass Extinction, and overpopulation and overconsumption of limited resources).

And yet we do nothing.

That is what interests me: Why we are incapable of acting in the face of our greatest existential threat. There is something about our current understanding of who we are and our relationship to the world that prevents us from seeing or understanding the gravity of the threat we face.

So the focus of my paintings has shifted in recent years. Now that people have finally started talking about climate change, I no longer feel the need to sound the alarm as directly as I did through my earlier natural disaster paintings. Instead my paintings are now a meditation on how WE need to change in order to be able to do something about climate change.

The thesis in my paintings is that in order to act on climate change we must be able to attribute value and importance to the natural world and our planet. We must be able to care about it and we must be able to identify with it. Rather than seeing ourselves as little islands, ‘individuals’ that are separate from everything and everybody else, and that are different, detached and superior to the natural world, we have to understand that we are embedded in a web of life from which we cannot be distinguished nor separated. On a profound and fundamental level all life has the same and equal value. Where the planet goes, so do we.

Let’s say your best friend was visiting the area and you wanted to show them the best time ever. Where would you take them? Give us a little itinerary – say it was a week long trip, where would you eat, drink, visit, hang out, etc.
Los Angeles is a wonderland of great art museums. Some of them, like the Getty Villa, the Getty Center, and the Huntington Art Museum, are in gorgeous settings. There are the important cornerstone museums, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA), and the Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA). And then there is the jewel of a museum, the Norton Simon Museum.

Who else deserves some credit and recognition?
We are woven into an extensive fabric of life, and we are dependent on that fabric for sharpening our interests and abilities. I have come in contact with countless artists, both contemporary and from art history, as well as thinkers and scientists who have all left their mark. It is my good fortune that the people closest to me have left the greatest mark on my thought and work, my husband, Steven Peckman, my brother, Christian Moevs, and friends.

Website: http://www.marinamoevs.com

Instagram: @marinamoevs

Linkedin: linkedin.com/in/marina-moevs-a906a12b

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/marina.moevs