My studio is shaded by two big black walnut trees. I’m kind of in love with them. They have this huge, green, calming presence that settles my nerves and makes me want to write and make art about the beauty, intricacy and wisdom that I feel radiating from the natural world around me. Somehow, they link me into a more solid reality than my fleeting human worries and ambitions.

Living on a riverside farm and working on the art program at Adkins Arboretum, I think I can safely claim that I know something of the power that nature has on creative work. After all, nature is all about creativity. We who work in the arts do well when we follow its lead.

I also know something about climate change. While politicians stupidly argue about whether it’s real, I see the river rippling up into the marsh beside our house every new moon and full moon and too often, watch it creep around the trees at the edge of our yard and lap across the lawn ever closer to the corner of our house. And I cringe at how the top leaves of our coral bark maple, which a friend of ours raised from a seed, have turned crinkly brown each of these past three Augusts, and I grieved last year when the red bud we planted at the edge of the yard succumbed to saltwater intrusion.

Like nearly everyone else these days, I’m gazing at a glowing screen as I type these words. But through incredible good luck (and many years of hard work), I’m sitting not in an air-conditioned cubicle or even a carpeted living room, but beside a screen door where the sound of cicadas blows in with the breeze and the dappled light filtering through the black walnut leaves dances across the floor.

Most people these days live in the artificial light and air and sound of indoors. Most people know climate change as a news story, another “issue” on the long list we should be addressing. Those of us who spend a lot of time outdoors feel it in our bones.

Generations ago, people lived on the land and were attuned to its daily and seasonal changes. Every indigenous culture had stories about their land, stories which told them when the winter would come and the spring thaw, how to conjure the stealth to stalk deer, and which trees to go to for food and medicine.

The old stories are lost and forgotten along with an instinctive love for the land and the innate need to honor it. Watching what’s happening to this good earth, I’ve often wondered whether I could’ve served better by going into the sciences—ecology leaps to mind—in order to help stem the tide of environmental degradation. But while we need science to help us comprehend the complexities of our ecological systems, we also need art. It’s the artists who are searching out the stories, tapping into archetypal truths, and working to recover a deep understanding of our relationship with the earth.

Ecoart is a rapidly expanding genre. Look it up in Wikipedia and you’ll find citations dating back more than half a century, but these days, you find it everywhere. More and more artists are concentrating on environmental issues, more and more galleries and museums are presenting shows focused on their work. Throughout history, artists have been in the vanguard of change, and what we need now is a thorough change in our outlook toward how to live harmoniously on this fragile earth.

It’s really smart of MassoniArt to focus this show on trees. Climate change is a huge subject encompassing literally all aspects of life on earth. It’s daunting to even think about it. But a tree, that’s something we can relate to. Trees stand upright, like we do. They grow and change with the seasons. They give us shade and make our landscape beautiful, and they are potent symbols in our mythologies and our religions. Possibly more than any other living being, trees give us a visceral, one-on-one sense of the presence of the natural world.

It’s that visceral feeling that engages us, that makes a towering tree, a swooping osprey or a sunlit landscape real to us, that pulls at the heartstrings. If you’re sitting in front of a glowing screen ensconced in the virtual world, how will you know that the natural balance is so far off-kilter? And why would you care? 

If you’re not physically present in the natural world, if you don’t go outside, it’s easy to ignore the changes in our environment and to live in complacency. But step out the door and feel the stifling heat. Notice the dying trees at the river’s edge where rising water has undercut their roots.

Let me make a seemingly simplistic statement: Our problem is that too many people these days don’t have friends who are trees. Trees teach us about growth and patience, about the cycle of the seasons, about cooperation (have you ever noticed how trees growing in close proximity will make space for one another’s branches?), about being intimate with the physical earth. Spend a little time with the artworks in this exhibit. Feel the fecund innocence of the leaves and flowers growing along Emily Kalwaitis’s young girl’s thigh, let the impenetrable black of Grace Mitchell’s primordial forest send prickles of fear up your spine, see your own face mirrored in the heart of Ken Schiano’s leafy tree.

It’s important to be aware of the accumulating facts about rising water, changing weather patterns and soaring extinction rates, but these teach the rational mind what’s happening. It’s equally vital to open the heart and the soul to the challenges we must face. When we do this, we embrace something deeper than data-crunching, we dip into the creative depths of nature itself. And there we may indeed find the impetus and the wisdom to address this catastrophic situation.

“Trees” is on view at MassoniArt September 6 through October 13. For more information, visit www.massoniart.com.

Mary McCoy is an artist and writer who has the good fortune to live beside an old steamboat wharf on the Chester River. She is a former art critic for the Washington Post and several art publications. She enjoys the kayaking the river and walking her family farm where she collects ideas and materials for the environmental art she creates, often in collaboration with her husband Howard. They have exhibited their work in the U.S., Ireland, Wales and New Zealand.

 

 

 

 

There’s some very intriguing photography on view in three of the Academy Art Museum’s four galleries through April 7. A roomful of newly acquired works by such prominent photographers as Ansel Adams, Berenice Abbott, William Eggleston, Lisette Model, and Bruce Nauman gives a brief taste of the startling breadth of photography’s range over the past century, but it’s the two other galleries, one with John Gossage’s work and the other with Matthew Moore’s, that will really leave you thinking.

Gossage is a well-known photographer living in Washington who taught at the University of Maryland College Park and who exhibits internationally. On view is “The Pond,” his 1985 series of black-and-white images shot in the vicinity of an unremarkable pond at the edge of a city. Unremarkable is the operative word, because Gossage focuses on its humdrum situation surrounded by ragtag trees, dusty paths and tangled vines bordering on a human landscape of suburban houses and their attendant chain link fences and power wires. A distinctly prosaic tableau is revealed that we know all too well is repeated thousands of times across the country wherever neighborhoods meet natural landscape. There’s nothing of the iconic richness and beauty found in Ansel Adams’s elegant “Cedar Tree and Maple Leaves” just across the hallway. Gossage presents these peripheral landscapes exactly as he finds them, brambled, scraggly, strewn with trash, and mostly overlooked.

But as you peruse these 47 photos (also published as a book), they get under your skin. However unremarkable their setting, they are photographed so skillfully, with such clarity of detail and evenness of tone, that their blandness seems almost exquisite. Every leaf, twig and blade of grass is clearly visible and acknowledged in Gossage’s photographs so that, perversely, they embody both the human longing for nature and our blatant disinterest in its existence. In titling his series “The Pond,” Gossage slyly built in an oblique but nagging reference to Walden Pond and Thoreau’s insatiable curiosity and Transcendentalist awe in exploring its every detail. In Gossage’s landscapes, the human presence is instead one of indifference, conspicuously devoid of any sense of wonder.

Upstairs, Easton photographer Matthew Moore’s “Post-Socialist Landscapes” bear some notable similarities to Gossage’s in that his photographs also draw their impact not from being beautiful, but from the deadpan, black-and-white austerity of their compositions and their crisp and intricate detail. An Associate Professor and Visual Arts Department Chair at Anne Arundel Community College, Moore shares Gossage’s fascination with the human presence in the landscape, but with a focus on how societies use landscape, particularly urban spaces, to manipulate our views of history. This series, shot during a 2014 residency at the Vilnius Academy of Arts’ Nida Art Colony in Lithuania, records the aftermath of Soviet occupation in photographs that fall into three categories.

One explores the crumbling military structures that were used to maintain power. There are former bunkers and machine gun nests being slowly overrun by graffiti and grass. The disused blast berms on Estonia’s Turisalu Missile Base are now so blanketed with small trees and wildflowers that they resemble Bronze Age barrows, transformed into just another bit of history buried in the ground.

A second group records public spaces where statues of Lenin, Stalin or both once stood. In some, the only remaining evidence is a cluster of ornamental bushes or an odd stretch of vacant pavement, while in “Lenin, Vilnius, Lithuania, 2014,” a visible scar still remains in the form of a bare spot smack dab in the center of a plaza. In a shot of Letna Hill in Prague, the huge pedestal that once held a 51-foot-tall statue of Stalin overlooking the city below has been repurposed to support an enormous metronome whose ticking provides a constant reminder of Czech struggles under Soviet communist rule.

In the third category, Moore documents the temporary resting places of these statues. The effect is sometimes comic, as when he discovered a discarded sculpted head of Lenin in a backyard in Estonia between some rubble and a flowering shrub. Others, such as busts of both Lenin and Stalin stored on stacks of wooden pallets, feel far more ominous. Like Prague’s ticking pendulum, they hold a warning that without vigilance, the political pendulum might easily swing back again.

Moore’s work and Gossage’s create a curious dialogue. While Moore explores how we consciously use landscape to promote agendas, Gossage documents what may be an even darker side of human nature—how little we notice or care about how we affect the land. Although both artists can legitimately be termed landscape photographers, their works expose far more about human proclivities than about the landscape we inhabit.

An egret stalks through the dark water of a marsh in Karen Klinedinst’s iPhoneography print “The Scout.” With its painterly touches and eerie glow, it’s strange and dreamlike, and it gets immediately under your skin. As environmental artists and the curators of this year’s annual “The Art of Stewardship” show at RiverArts, Howard and I chose the theme “Listening to the Earth” to encourage artwork and poetry that, like Klinedinst’s, is inspired by paying close attention to the world around us. What we were looking for is the kind of honed awareness that germinates an open, honest understanding of our situation and responsibilities as part of the community of this earth.

Does art have the power to effect change? It’s hard to forget an image like “The Scout.” It’s achingly beautiful, yet there’s death everywhere. Rotting vegetation and the skeletons of trees are part and parcel of this intricate and delicate environment. A marsh is a fertile place where fish and crabs spawn and egrets find abundant food, yet stay on high alert lest they, in turn, become dinner for an eagle or raccoon. The strength of Klinedinst’s image is that it takes in and reveals the wholeness of this place. The making of a powerful painting or a poem requires a journey into attentive awareness. It’s a fascinating and nourishing process not only for the artist but for viewers as well, if they, too, approach it with similar open, inquisitive mindfulness

Kate McGraw’s poem, “A Boy and his Dandelion,” may seem at first to be chiefly about a child’s sense of wonder at seeing the flower’s seeds fly into the air, but it’s much more. McGraw summons the thrust of the wind and the scents radiating from the boy’s warm body, skillfully pulling us into the physicality of the moment. She uses words to paint the gossamer, glinting fragility of the tufted seeds and the mystery of where they are going, complete with a hint of their procreative objective. The boy himself imagines them as paratroopers, bravely adventuring into unknown places, and with this, a tingle arises in the back of the mind. This is a primitive urge—to ascribe intention to inanimate objects, to think of them as having aspirations and emotions, in short, as having consciousness.

What leaps to mind is the beliefs of indigenous people in tree spirits, water spirits and the like. These are people who live intimately with the land, aware of its every mood and cycle and the intricacy of the relationships of its plants and animals. Like Klinedinst’s egret, they are wholly dependent on their environment. Far from being quaint and naïve, might their superstitions have a certain wisdom? If we think of animals and plants as having consciousness, however different from our own, we might pay more attention to the ways they live and how their interactions and well-being affect our own survival. Such an approach would develop empathy for species besides our own and encourage a developing understanding of the interdependence of all life on earth.

There’s a prickly sensation of taut vitality emanating from the antler forms in William Willis’s large painting. They feel alive and

sentient. Behind them are half-hidden forms, perhaps an animal hide stretched to dry, a bowl, a doorway, an abstracted tree—layers of activity and history giving witness to Willis’s search to find vital force in his subject matter. There’s something almost scary about this painting which Willis acknowledges with the title “Who’s Afraid of the Dark.”

It’s actually quite unnerving to think that nature is alive and aware of us and that humans are by no means in control. Gary Irby succinctly calls up the creepy feeling of an animal watching from the shadows with the piercing eyes and bristling sticks of his sculpture “Nature’s Watching.” But even more powerfully, this work mischievously prods at the sense of guilt and looming doom that lurks in all of us in these days of runaway fossil fuel extraction, snowballing pollution and escalating climate change.

You might think that art and poetry about earth stewardship would tend to scold our profligate ways—or weep over them, but few of the works in this show could be classified as “protest art.” The closest are Irby’s “Nature’s Watching” and his ceramic pot with two talking heads conspicuously facing in opposite directions with the title “Discussing Selling our Environment.” Also in the running is Rebecca Clark’s “Oblivion” with its beach-goer blandly cocooned behind sunglasses and earbuds, oblivious to the devastations of storm and fire raging behind her.

Most of the show’s works are focused on exploring and celebrating the breadth of the subject: earth and its ecology. There are whales, domestic birds, wild birds, wild animals (deer, lions, elephants), insects, Eastern Shore waterscapes, and Antarctic ice. There is the vastness of huge clouded skies and the intimacy of a ladybug stalking aphids on a fragile flower.

Curiously, with the exception of Anita Kusick’s lush fields of flowers in “Gathering (Pike Farms – Conserved by Peconic Land Trust),” none of the works are about farming. Farmers are the principle stewards of land on the Eastern Shore, and it’s heartening to see more and more of them transitioning their land to organic from “conventional” farming (that is, planting Roundup-ready GMO crops managed with glyphosate and other chemicals). Likewise, it’s cheering to witness the widespread use of cover crops and forested shorelines to keep farm runoff out of waterways and to note the reintroduction of diverse crops and animal husbandry. Supported by a host of government programs, farmers are making a difference, as are hunters and organizations such as Ducks Unlimited that work to reestablish healthy habitats for wildlife.

In the call for submissions, we said “Art should bristle with energy and keep tugging at your thoughts.” It’s only when art has this kind of power to stimulate thought and encourage further investigation that it can trigger change for the better. The sense of childlike wonder that so many of these poems and artworks evoke is crucial in reshaping of our attitudes, and the edgy sense of danger in several of them acts as a much-needed spur to work for sustainable ways to live harmoniously with our earth.

If we fail in this, it’s serious. Life on earth will likely continue, though predications are that numerous species, including humans, will have disappeared and insects will be dominant. Quilter Christine Kamon chose to accompany her graceful “Dragonflies” with a quote from writer and artist Clive Barker that posits an idyllic future time when all traces of humans and our activities will be long gone and dragonflies and hummingbirds will flit in a golden afternoon. It’s a beautiful scene but one we’d like to postpone as long as possible.

Mary McCoy is an artist and writer who has the good fortune to live beside an old steamboat wharf on the Chester River. She is a former art critic for the Washington Post and several art publications. She enjoys kayaking the river and walking her family farm where she collects ideas and materials for the environmental art she creates, often in collaboration with her husband Howard. They have exhibited their work in the U.S., Ireland, Wales and New Zealand.

Recommended reading:
David Abram’s Becoming Animal
David Hinton’s Hunger Mountain
Andy Goldsworthy’s Time

 

Exhibition Dates: April 4 – 25
RiverArts 
315 High Street, Suite 106
Chestertown, MD 21620 United States