Flower faces and deer heads: women and nature in art

These two artists are parsing out women's relationship with nature. The result is both beautiful and haunting.

Marco Mazzoni’s women among birds and blooms

Marco Mazzoni is the artist that first hooked me into Hi-Fructose magazine, when it published a thick, book-like insert of his Moleskine sketches. I’m a sucker for birds and colored pencil anyway, but the energy and movement of these drawings really snagged my soul. I bought volume 27 just to pin up around my house.

Marco Mazzoni’s Naturama show features drawings that “are focused on the rituals of struggle between animals in the wild, and the impossibility of harmony in nature.”

Mazzoni’s more “refined” work is quite darker, telling stories of women healers and the way their power and knowledge were muzzled. I’ve read that the pieces are influenced by Italian folklore, which prevailing religions tried to silence.

 Mazzoni calls these images still lifes, displaying a “moment when a woman takes control of all, in harmony with nature.”

But birds and flowers surround the women’s faces; humans, birds and flowers exchange life forces. It’s empowering in the sense that knowing that you’re going to die and become something else is empowering, and as long as you’re at peace with that, this is inspiring work. [see more here]

Emily Burns’ deer-headed women

Also from Hi-Fructose, I just found Emily Burns, who showed her work at P.S. Gallery in the fall.

On her website, Burns says, “My recent work investigates the inner complexities of women through intimate glimpses of parallel environments. I am interested in the vulnerability of beauty, and the eternalization of my subjects through the process of painting.” Pretty badass.

“These works describe the psychological juxtaposition between the inherent urge to exploit one’s own short-lived youth and the pressures of adhering to social expectation.” – Emily Burns

Burns’s women model no boar heads or even big cats. She sticks to the animals most prized for being light and graceful, just like the pin-up girls. 

 

In context of their habitats, both deer and women will be dedicated mothers, smart and sociable members of their herd, and fierce survivors in an unforgiving environment. When men remove them from that and place them on a plaque or in a picture on a screen, they become trophies. Are they trophies that symbolize all the other traits, or are they simply prized as a show of the hunter’s prowess? A lot of that depends on the viewer.

In a statement on Beautiful/Decay, Burns says, “I explore the push and pull of these two concepts [see quote above], asking how they have affected the female psyche and as well as how society has actively created its own vision of the idealized female.”

“Finally, the figures are foregrounded against fragmented views of digital interruption and pixilation, serving to remind one of how computerized communication has profoundly affected how we reimagine the female form.” – Emily Burns

These are just two artists I’ve been excited about lately. There's also Laurent Seroussi, who paints insect women, which reminds me of a very early episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Who else is exploring nature/environment and the feminine? Anyone examining the masculine form? Let us know in the comments!

This post originally appeared on my website, where it never fully fit. I also just wrote about an artist of Appalachia named Stacy Kranitz on my new blog, tentatively titled Gasconader.