"Stewardship is an expression of our highest moral potential because we can deliberate about right and wrong and measure consequences that ultimately become our future.
History shows that choosing the more difficult path because
it is the right or wise path is difficult for us.”
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~CHARLIE WESTBROOK
ROADKILL
ARTIST STATEMENT
The animals in Roadkill are caught—not by nets or walls, but by the absence of everywhere else. These paintings present wildlife suspended in the aftermath of nature's erasure, occupying threatening environments not because of what's present, but because of what's missing. They are trapped by subtraction, caught in the airless vacuum of human design where wildness has no habitat left except the margins we've overlooked. We call it roadkill when a deer meets a highway, but the real collision happened decades earlier—when we paved over migration routes, when we chose concrete over creek beds, when we decided our sprawl mattered more than their survival.
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We keep building, keep expanding, pursuing our own dystopia with the fervor of true believers, as if comfort and convenience will save us from the consequences of our comfort and convenience. These paintings ask the question we refuse to answer: Why do we insist on creating a world that kills everything, including eventually us? The animals in Roadkill stare out from their captivity—not because humans put them there deliberately, but because we've engineered a world where there is nowhere else for them to be. Their containment is our containment. Their slow extinction mirrors our own.
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We are all roadkill now, caught in the momentum of a civilization that cannot stop destroying the only home it has. The difference is the animals didn't choose this. We did. We continue to choose it with every decision that prioritizes the temporary over the permanent, the convenient over the crucial, the developed over the living. Look closely: the soft threat in these images isn't aimed at the animals. It's aimed at us.
10% of Sale Proceeds will be Donated to the Jane Goodall Institute
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Dr. Jane Goodall discovered that when we put local communities at the heart of conservation, we improve the lives of people, animals and the environment. JGI advances Dr. Goodall’s holistic approach through a tapestry of nine strategies that build on each other and bring the power of community-centered conservation to life.
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