Artist Mira Lehr’s work spans four decades, a career dedicated to expressing both the beauty and destruction of the environment. Using abstract imagery and non-traditional mediums such as gunpowder, fire, Japanese paper, dyes, and welded steel, she invites the viewer into her world.
This story comes from our friends at WPBT South Florida PBS.
Read the script:
[Mira] The beauty is very important to me, but I have to take the bloom off the rose.
I'm Mira Lehr, I'm an artist. All of my work has burning of some kind in it, and I think it does reflect both sides of creation. Creation, and destruction. And that's what nature is all about. It's always related to the environment.
I always drew when I was a little kid, I never really knew I would be a professional artist. As I grew older, I decided I was gonna study art history in college. I was so lucky because at the time I graduated the abstract expressionists were holding forth in New York, and it was a major movement. So I was right in the middle of this really wonderful scene. So from then on, I did art.
And I was not really into the environment as much in the beginning. I just did nature, a lot of nature studies. But eventually I heard of Buckminster Fuller, a man who was very much about the planet. And I saw an opportunity to work with him in 1969. I went to New York and I worked with him on something called the world game. And that was about how to make the world work in the most efficient way, and doing more with less.
So from then on, I was hooked. I'm feeling two urgencies. One I'm getting older, that's an urgency. You know, how many years do I have left? And the other urgency is how many years does the planet have left? So we've converged.
Every day I get up raring to go. And so now I'm back in the studio and I'm turning to something I'm calling planetary visions because I'm doing images of Earth masses. I've also added writing, which some of it is from Bucky Fuller about the planet. Some of it is just poetry about nature.
I've always felt abstraction as I as foreign, even though I like representation. But to me abstraction gets the essence, the essence of everything. And you can take it and go on with it. And it's more spiritual to me.
You know, if the world falls apart and people are concerned just with their little everyday existence, I don't see a great future. But I'm hoping there's still time. The clock is definitely ticking.
And I'm not a politician and I'm not a scientist. The way I can express it is through my art and that's what I'm trying to do along with having a wonderful experience making it.