Joan Baez
Greta with Hat , 2019
24 x 28
in
acrylic on panel
Joan loves Greta so much that she made two paintings. She gets emotional every time she talks about Greta Thunberg, the teenage climate change activist from Sweden who was named Time magazine’s 2019 “Person of the Year.”
“I can’t even begin,” Joan says. “She just has the guts and the wits, she’s fearless and funny. And she’s 24/7 for the cause.” Greta has been 24/7 for the cause since, beginning in August, 2018, when she was 15, a high school freshman who famously began skipping school on Fridays to camp out in front of the Swedish Parliament holding a sign with “Skolstrejk for Klimatet” (School Strike for Climate) written in big, black, hand-written letters.
Her action and her attendant overnight fame inspired 4 million people – many of them school kids like her -- to participate in a global climate strike in September 2019 that was the largest climate demonstration ever.
Once so upset by global warming that she refused to speak, she has come out of her shell to spar with climate-denier Donald Trump on Twitter and has dropped the jaws of the powerful with her blunt speeches, saying to world leaders at a U.N. Climate Action Summit in September 2019: “This is all wrong. I shouldn’t be up here. I should be back in school on the other side of the ocean. Yet you all come to us young people for hope? How dare you! You have stolen my dreams and my childhood with your empty words.”
Joan, who has been known to mince few words herself, says, “She doesn’t mind telling it like it is, saying, ‘All you people will go back to your cars and planes.’ She has no problem calling out chastising people. They don’t know what to think.”
Joan is particularly impressed by Thunberg’s commitment to practicing what she preaches. Refusing to fly in fuel-guzzling jets, she sailed across the Atlantic in a carbon-neutral catamaran and convinced her parents to give up air travel as well. “When she got her mother, an opera singer, to quit flying,” Joan notes, “her mother had to quit her opera career.” Thunberg has been diagnosed with Asperger syndrome, seeing it not as an illness but instead as her “superpower.”
“She’s open about Asperger, which is really helpful for people to be able to talk about things like that,” Joan says. In addition to appearing on the cover of Time, Thunberg’s image, with her intense stare and braided hair, has been featured on everything from coffee cups and murals to greeting cards, t-shirts and Halloween costumes. And now in a painting by Joan Baez.
SOLD
