Thinking about Apathy in Nature

Today I awoke to find an article in my inbox that begged me to read it. The topic was one that Tina and I have batted around in a past post, Finding Truth in a False Idyll. The author, Alan Lightman, writes in the article entitled, Our Lonely Home in Nature:

After each disaster, we grieve over the human lives lost, the innocent people drowned or crushed without warning as they slept in their beds, worked in their fields or sat at their office desks. We feel angry at the scientists and policy makers who didn’t foresee the impending calamity or, if forewarned, failed to protect us. Beyond the grieving and anger is a more subtle emotion. We feel betrayed. We feel betrayed by nature.

Aren’t we a part of nature, born in nature, sustained by the food brought forth by nature, warmed by the natural sun? Don’t we have a deep spiritual connection with the wind and the water and the land that Emerson and Wordsworth so lovingly described, that Turner and Constable painted in scenes of serenity and grandeur? How could Mother Nature do this to us, her children?

It seems that prior to nature wrecking havoc on our individual lives we take a default stand that nature is a provider of resources, landscapes, wildlife, and substance. We see the avalanche prone mountains, flood stage rivers, tornado conditions, landslide slopes, fire adapted chaparral, and seismically active regions as the exception to the rule that nature loves and nurtures us. This is an understandable condition given our origin. We, like all life on earth, are a product of this planet. If this rock provided conditions that brought us into being how could it also bring about conditions that destroy homes and wreck lives?

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.

Time-Lapse Photography

Just a friendly reminder of the beauty that exists in this world. Hat tip to The Daily Dish.

Very Little Stars from Timelapse, Inc. on Vimeo.

Jamie Scott

Landscape Nostalgia, or, How My Brain Replicates Pulaski County Topography

Certain landscapes will never leave my memory: clouds hustling over the continental divide at Monteverde, cow-spotted pastures in purple-and-gold winter, and the welcoming bluffs on Stadium Boulevard. None, however, are so ingrained or so pure than my childhood world in Dixon, Missouri. Rivers and cliffs direct the curving roads. Foliage looks lusher, the fields more trim than any of their counterparts in my second home of Lebanon. There's the oak-walled house my great-great grandfather built and that little house on the hill where a nice farmboy once lived. There's the east edge of our field where the deer always appeared on misty mornings. The fallen log between two trunks that my cousins and I used as teeter-totter. The country was my playground.

I've returned lately with friends. Even places I had never seen, such as the view from above Riddle Bridge or panoramas across Maries County, strike familiar chords.

Nostalgia comes with some caveats. The drives remain beautiful, but the gas tab hurts (those rivers and bluffs keep good roads away; it would take hefty blasting jobs to change it, and frankly, the government doesn't have that kind of money for backwoods folks). Recently at a Dixon festival, I couldn't help but desire better food, different music and more culture. People gawked at my dreadlocked, colorfully dressed friends. Memories, meet Reality. Suddenly moving to industrial Lebanon when I was 10 years old seemed like a good move for the sake of culture. Thanks, grandparents.

But the landscape abides.

A View Through The Lens of DTC Photography

I recently had the chance to interview the head of DTC Photography, David Crabtree. After years of admiring his work it was great to get a peak into what drives his photography and the thoughts that go into each captured moment.

NM:It seems that a lot of your photography captures the areas between the built and the natural landscapes, are these areas you seek out?
DC:Built and natural landscapes have sort of become my comfort zone shots. I seem to do a better job with these scenes and so I am often drawn to them. I also see the comfort zone as challenge in which I must break out of that zone and try new things that I am unfamiliar with. Lately I have been experimenting with HDR photography and also some photos with more live and movement in them. As an amateur photographer, this can be a real challenge sometimes but hopefully the saying is true: "Practice makes perfect".

Finding Truth in a False Idyll

nature: noun /ˈnāCHər/ a nebulous word that generations have struggled to adequately define.

The world's changing shape and humanity's increasingly complex relationship to it have only added to difficulty of this task. In this spirit of continuing the discussion, we're sharing our e-mails about False Idyll by J.B. MacKinnon.

from:		Nick
to:		Tina
date:		Sun, May 27, 2012 at 5:54 PM
subject:		False Idyll | J.B. MacKinnon | Orion Magazine

I thought I had found an interesting article for you but as it is from Orion I assume you beat me to it. What do you think of it? Come to Alaska. I can show you the not so nice part of nature.

The Wild Bluffs

I pulled a twig from my hair, clinging with the other hand to a small branch. A blue jay’s jeer pierced through my heavy breathing, but I saw no sign of the bird or my friend below. If a rock tumbled, I could go with it — 60 feet down to a scoured-out creek bed.

The scoured-out creek bed. Photo by Miranda Metheny.

It was August 27, 2001, and in the first weekend of our senior year in college, I traveled to Three Creeks Conservation Area with my friend Miranda. She hadn’t been in Missouri for twelve months, and I hadn’t been in woods since the start of the summer heat wave; after reading The Wild Trees about the redwood canopies, I was craving a climb.

We skipped Rock Bridge State Park; it’s too mediated, too mapped. In the Columbia, Mo., microcosm, if Rock Bridge is Muir Woods, then Three Creeks is at least like Humboldt Redwoods State Park. There’s a little more left to discover. Some know this area for its “swimming hole” in Bonne Femme Creek that’s easy to find from a parking lot. Fewer know about Turkey Creek’s holes, cliff swallows and dripping moss. Even fewer have seen the dove habitat’s purple-blue shade on a full moon or smelled the musky green-gold grass as they broke a path through it. Like the canopy explorers, though, I don’t share these places with just anyone.

The land is by no means untouched. “Through the years, the timber was grazed and logged and occasional fires swept through the area,” the Missouri Department of Conservation website reads. “Because of these practices, the land has suffered...“ The geology, however, endures.

I have never done any truly dangerous climbs, and these rises are often biologically bland. But I think I understand in some small way what Steve Sillett felt when he looks up at a redwood. I feel the bluff tops beckon. Carved by many millennia of water and wind, bluffs hold geologic history I barely understand. They’re nearly vertical, and yet saplings and animals brave enough to defy gravity keep living on them.

When a human defies gravity, “brave” morphs to “reckless.” I was free climbing. My flat-soled Converse shoes began slipping in the soil and I stretched to the nearest root. It slipped too. Nothing felt stable. Loose rocks all around, and nothing else in reach. I was relying on one foothold at the base of a bush with my body pressed against the steep ground. Scrambling ensued, and a minute later I made it.

“Miranda,” I shouted. “I found another trail.”

“Are you staying up there?” she answered. Her voice could barely climb the bluff.

“I can come down, but it won’t be graceful.”

“I’ll come up. Give me a minute.”

As I waited for her ascent, I thought about how Steve Sillett didn’t curse in the canopy. After scrambling around the Ozarks for years, the reservation seems clear. A certain respect is reserved for nature when it forces us into tough places.

- I wrote this as an assignment for Bill Allen's "Readings in Science Journalism: Four Great Books on the Environment" class. The prompt was to "write a personal narrative about your own encounters with the natural world, reflecting on all the encounters described in The Wild Trees by Richard Preston." It was a good exercise, restricted to 500 words. I'm happy to share it with you now.