Who is the Artist?
I remember walking as a young girl with my dad to school one day. The rain had broken long enough for us to walk the short distance from my house to my elementary school. The trees were damp and discoloured from the heavy rainfall that had recently passed us, and the earth smelled of wet moss and cedar. As we were walking over the foot bridge and down the trail, my dad stopped and stared for a while at a tree. Curious about his discovery, I too stopped and mimicked my dad.
‘What do you see?’ he asked me.
I didn’t say anything for a while, knowing that the wrong answer, or more to the point an answer he wasn’t looking for, might frustrate him.
‘Um … bark, and a tree. Some rain on the tree, I guess,’ I said quietly.
‘What colours do you see?’ he asked.
‘Mostly brown,’ I responded.
‘Look closer. I once read a book that said that at first glance a leaf may appear green, and bark may appear brown, but once we look closer, we realize that everything in nature has dimension. Everything in nature is at least two toned.’
This stuck with me and about twenty years later I still remember this. I cannot notice nature now without acknowledging that bark is not just brown, but also green, and blue sometimes even red. A leaf may appear green, but upon closer inspection it is white and yellow. Even the things we think are simple or one-toned, hold more colour and inspiration than we may think.
Pondering this memory reminded me of the images located in Dorothea Von Handelman’s ‘Bees, Exhibitions and the Anthropocene.’ Are humans artists or are we just giving ourselves the impression that we are? Nature does what it wants, and we have to sacrifice control otherwise we stand in the way of hurricanes, tornados and droughts. Art is everywhere, yet we deem only some people to be artists. Could nature be the truest artist of them all?
All this to say, how much of natural art is due to the artist? How much control does the artist really have? It seems that any time humans try to over-control nature, to force it to be a way that it does not want to be, it backfires on us. Too much sun is not good, but neither is too much water. It is a balancing act which humans have little to no control over. Is there really even a human artist then when dealing with nature? Or is nature the true artist who gives us the impression of control?
