It is a shame that the words “Cover by Sarah Bereza” are so small on the back cover of A Tree for Antarctica. Her beautiful art shouts out the novel’s theme while also portraying a major location in the book extraordinarily well.
This successful cover for my book might be because Sarah has always looked beneath the surface for inspiration, making her an ideal conveyor of meaning through art.
If I had not watched her growing up from finger paints and crayons to her own mature exhibitions and beyond, I would not have felt so sure that she would be the perfect designer for the cover of A Tree For Antarctica.
Of course, there were her first two exhibitions in London, which solely displayed her paintings of cows so abundant in the English countryside. Just cows. One cow after another, in their beautiful, redolent poses. You could fairly smell the dripping milk and loamy sod. I wondered, “Who on earth puts on two exhibitions like that and turns them both into big successes?!” She did.
The cow paintings were followed by years of standard, beautifully executed commissions, always with a few more enigmatic pieces thrown into the mix – enough to worry her mother that Sarah might never fully capitalize on her art.
And then, there was Chernobyl. For some time, the political changes brought by the Orange Revolution in Ukraine and the fall of the Berlin Wall had captured Sarah’s imagination. When these events enabled a visit to the city of Chernobyl, Sarah Bereza went for it at her first opportunity. That was in 2014.
Chernobyl and its surrounding villages represented a terrible disaster for all living things anywhere nearby and downwind beyond. It also represented a chance to see natural selection and survival of the fittest at work, with nature returning under her own terms.
Sarah and her husband, composer Will Bates, outfitted themselves with heavy suits, similar but larger than those used when getting an Xray since hazmat suits were not sold. They held small radiation detectors and set off for a good walk around the perimeter where walking was allowed. They also saw the four-square-mile Red Forest Zone, where no people may visit. Some determined locals had filtered back to their perimeter villages over time and live there still, in spite of the risks.
Beyond the crumbling villages and town, Sarah and Wills also saw trees, weeds, grasses, wildflowers, small mammals, rodents, and birds that had returned. The immediate reactor area itself is now a preserve, sequestered henceforth from the shenanigans of humans.
Seeing new trees taking hold again gave Sarah a feel for their persistence and for our own need for trees. Her most recent series of tree paintings can be found on her website below.
During this Age of Climate Change, we need trees more than ever – to drawdown CO2, to create oxygen, and to help cool us as we live on this ever-warmer planet.
Thank you, Sarah, for your cover art for A Tree for Antarctica!
To see more of her art, please visit:
www.sarahbereza.com
@sarahbereza
VJ (Ginny) Michaux