NEW YORK, NY / ACCESS Newswire / November 3, 2026 / Last November, fire spread through the pavilions at COP30 in Belém, Brazil. It was a few meters away, in the pavilion next door, when artist Ekaterina Sky went back inside to carry out a single painting.

Today, she refuses to sell it.

Forests of the World has traveled from COP30 to Miami Art Week, Carnegie Hall and LA Climate Week. Sky believes its value lies in keeping it in the world, where it can continue to be seen and carry its message.

For someone with a degree in international business, keeping this work off the market is a deliberate choice.

Sky understands how markets assign value. She also understands that putting a price on something can change the way people see it.

When the fire broke out at COP30, Sky was in another room. As people evacuated, she remembered that Forests of the World was still standing on an easel inside the Entertainment and Culture pavilion.

She went back through the crowd, picked up the framed painting and carried it outside.

Once outside, she struggled to breathe.

The painting survived.

The river behind the painting

The story behind Forests of the World began years earlier in Indonesian Borneo.

Sky traveled along the Sekonyer River toward Camp Leakey, one of the world's best-known centers for orangutan research.

From the boat, she saw two very different landscapes.

On one side were rainforest, orangutans, hornbills and ancient trees. On the other were palm oil plantations stretching toward the horizon. It was horrifying.

Sky was already a working artist when she made the trip, but the experience changed the direction of her work. Forests became increasingly central to what she created.

Years later, the connection became personal in another way. Fires came to Los Angeles, where Sky lives and works, and she developed asthma.

There is no such thing as far away.

Those experiences helped shape Forests of the World.

The painting brings together major forest ecosystems and connects them through water. Forests release moisture into the atmosphere that can travel and eventually fall as rain thousands of miles away.

So called "Sky rivers."

For her, the idea is a reminder that what happens to a forest in one part of the world can have consequences far beyond it.

What is a painting worth?

Sky has painted since she was six and has worked professionally as an artist for more than a decade. Before focusing entirely on art, she spent 12 years as a model signed by Elite Models and Next Canada.

Along the way, she earned a B.A. in International Business from the John Molson School of Business at Concordia University in Montreal.

That education shaped how she thinks about the business of art.

Sky understands pricing, scarcity and how markets turn objects into assets. She also understands how quickly the financial value of a work can become part of its identity.

That is what she does not want for Forests of the World.

Instead of selling the painting, Sky takes it into spaces where it can be seen and where it can start conversations about forests, water and the relationship between nature and the economy.

She does not want its potential sale price to become the story.

Sky is not opposed to selling art. She sells other work and relies on those sales to make a living and support the larger projects connected to her work.

She simply believes this painting has greater value outside the market. It is the same with a forest. Standing, it is worth far more than anything it could be sold for.

A painting that is working cannot also be a painting that is sold.

Where the money goes

Sky has also built environmental giving into the work she sells. Ten percent of every art sale goes toward planting native trees. Direct donations made through ourlifeforce.org go entirely to tree planting, apart from a small transaction fee retained by the Collidescope Foundation, the 501(c)(3) nonprofit that fiscally sponsors the project.

The rest goes back into the work: community murals, the Borneo projects, film, and the cost of running a practice that makes all of it possible.

For Sky, transparency about where the money goes matters.

"Art for a cause" can easily become a slogan without anything tangible behind it. She wanted the impact to be measurable and transparent.

One of the bodies of work supporting that model is Prayer for the Earth, a series created in watercolor and sustainable 24K gold leaf on archival paper.

Beneath the gold of each painting is a handwritten prayer sealed inside the work. The words cannot be seen, but a chip inside the painting allows the prayer to be heard.

The series will be shown privately in Beverly Hills on October 22.

When nature becomes a business issue

Sky does not believe business is the problem.

Her argument is that businesses and economies already depend on natural systems, whether they think about them that way or not.

The World Economic Forum has estimated that roughly $44 trillion of economic value, more than half of global GDP, is moderately or highly dependent on nature.

The World Bank has projected that water scarcity could cost some regions as much as 6% of GDP by 2050.

When water becomes scarce, the effects reach agriculture, energy, manufacturing, cities, insurance and supply chains.

For Sky, those numbers make the economic argument.

Art serves a different purpose.

A statistic can explain the scale of the problem. Sky believes a painting can make people feel connected to what those numbers represent.

That is where her business education and her work as an artist come together.

She understands how markets determine what something is worth. But she does not believe the market has to determine the purpose of everything she creates.

Some paintings can be sold.

Some can help fund the work that comes next.

And some can have greater value by remaining in the world.

For Sky, Forests of the World is one of them.

Ekaterina Sky is an artist based between Los Angeles and New York. Her work explores the relationship between art, nature and collective impact.

Media Details:

Ekaterina Sky
Contact: heather@buccianocommunications.com
Collidescope Foundation
New York, NY

SOURCE: Ekaterina Sky