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I've been interested in drawing and painting since I was a child, but it was
four years of living in Europe as a young teenager that really made me an
artist. My most impressive experience in that respect was a visit to Lascaux
during the brief time those caves were open to the public. I would have been
around 13 or 14 years old and I was completely overwhelmed by the enduring
beauty of the art and by the fact that it was so incredibly ancient —
some 17,000 years old.
Another forming experience (from around the same time) concerned Jacques
Louis David's painting Oath of the Horatii. As a boy I
had often seen this painting reproduced in art and history books, and I liked
it in relation to an interest I had in the history and mythologies of ancient
Greece and Rome. To suddenly encounter it full-scale in the Louvre —
to see it as a colossal painting rather than simply as a book illustration
— had a very strong impact.
During my art education my greatest interests were conceptual art and
minimalism. Ideas are important to me, and I've always developed interests
which include history, archeology, anthropology, the sciences, and
philosophy.
Spinoza's notion of God-or-Nature (Deus sive Natura) was something
else which took a hold of me when I was quite young. As a result of religious
teachings I was struggling with the idea of God and not coming up with any
satisfactory explanation until I stumbled upon Spinoza in a popular book on
the history of civilization. His notion (only vaguely understood at the time)
fit in well with my own spiritual feelings which were most intense when I was
out in the natural world. As a boy I moved around a lot but, no matter where
I was, I always sought out my own private Walden — a place where I
could feel connected to the great outdoors (I didn't read Thoreau until much
later, however).
During my art education I also took an interest in how certain artists and
philosophers had traditionally related to nature. In these cases the term
"nature" didn't always relate specifically to plants and animals but to
natural forms and materials. Hegel, in his Aesthetic, wrote about how
art is something that takes nature to a higher level — that art is a
result of human imagination imposed upon natural materials and coming up with
forms nature couldn't otherwise achieve.
The idea of making art in nature by integrating art with the
natural world didn't really seem to come about until artists such as Robert
Smithson and Richard Long took art out of the galleries and into the
landscape in the 1960s and 70s.
Prior to that, art so literally integrated with the natural world was art
that civilization scoffed at: the art of people who were labeled "savage" and
"primitive" (like those artists of Lascaux). But this "primitive" art was
profoundly rooted in the natural world in ways that "civilized" art could not
be. In fact, civilization evolved with the very intention of setting humans
apart from nature: the marble floor serving to elevate and insulate
civilized humans from the primal mud. Idealized and durable forms made of
stone and metal became preferred over the rough-hewn and profane forms more
directly associated with organic nature. Until very recently, nature was
considered something to be overcome as the threatening "other" — the
ancient nature god Pan, for example, serving as a template for the depiction
of Satan.
Suddenly however — in ways we are still trying to come to terms with
— nature is re-asserting itself. Suddenly we are being made aware that
we are nature and subject to a very delicate balance of natural
processes and conditions that has allowed us to evolve and survive. We
can't separate ourselves. We are discovering, to our great distress,
that human attitudes concerning the natural world might have reached the
level of insolence, and that Spinoza's God-that-is-Nature is capable of
turning on us as surely as any anthropomorphic God made angery by our
excesses and disrespect.
There's a phrase "the sacred landscape" which is often used in reference to
how certain indigenous peoples have come to understand the world around them.
The landscape and nature have meaning. Mountains, lakes, rivers, forests and
even trees and stones have spirit, and there are often ghosts associated with
them.Things have happened out there — there are stories connected to
this landscape that tell us about ourselves and who we are and what we've
done. This is important stuff, and it's up to the cultural workers —
artists of all kinds — to keep these stories and traditions alive.
This is the source of not only our cultural life but also our spiritual life.
What effected me so much during that visit to Lascaux was the realization,
for perhaps the very first time, that the landscape is indeed sacred and that
I'm a part of a much bigger story.
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