Salt Water Disposal Well

a piece from the Oklahoma Landscapes collection

Oil on Canvas, 2016

Oklahoma Landscapes is a series of representational oil paintings depicting the pastoral beauty of the Oklahoma landscape -- punctuated by horizontal drilling wells, salt disposal wells and other physical evidence of our oil and gas industry. Some paintings are portraits of specific equipment. In essence, these paintings depict the equipment whose use induces seismicity. Oklahoma Landscapes serves to both answer and ask questions. It answers: what does this equipment that causing all the fuss look like? And, by being nestled so beautifully amidst the landscape, it asks, why is it so easy to not see these objects in the landscape? Why is it easy to ignore a small thing that causes huge problems? Saltwater disposal wells are easily overlooked spindly bits of piping. It is hard to believe that they cause as much damage as they do: epicenters of earthquakes occur within a ten kilometers of them, and they’re a necessary component of hydraulic fracturing.

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