Caribou Migration - Mixed Media Painting

This mixed media painting celebrates one of the great mysteries and ecological treasures of the Arctic: caribou migration. It started with a small watercolor with an endless line of caribou depicted by masking.

This painting, one of several Arctic themed watercolors using masking of birds, mammals, and light, didn't quite satisfy me. It rested on a shelf until I began the Arctic climate series. Then it leapt up clamoring for a mixed media, mysterious treatment.

It's set in a shadow box made of a 1.5 inch deep frame turned backwards and painted deep blue. Ordinary aluminum window screen is stapled across the back. The watercolor is affixed to the screen. I handcut snowflakes from iridescent origami paper and glued them below the watercolor. Similar ready made stars are glued along the top of the frame. These express the beauty of cold, night, and navigating by starlight.

To tie the elements together in a story of seasonal migration, I added "curtains": black fabric screen to the left and white mesh fabric to the right. I flavored the winter-summer symbolism with blue beads on the left, yellow and white beads to the right.

Looks like the caribou are migrating from summer grazing to winter shelter.

I've always been fascinated by caribou. About three years ago I read the most amazing book about their migration, Being Caribou by Karsten Heuer. He and his new bride spent six months following a migrating caribou herd - on foot!

More than anything else, this painting is a prayer for the caribou and their continuing migration.
 

Arctic Fog: Mixed Media Painting

Arctic Fog, mixed media, 19 x 27"

This painting could be called a collage, since it's constructed of different parts. First, there's the black pet screen that was stapled to painted stretcher bars. Once there was a scene of river under night sky, including a number of stars cut from aluminum flashing. This was cut open, losing a few stars and a lot of painted water, clouds, and fish. Next, I painted the bird's eye view of the tundra in acrylic on paper. Then I gessoed a thin rectangle on a remnant of denim overalls leg, as a ground for five loons, painted in acrylic on an ambiguous, pinkish fog.

The denim was stitched to the pet screen, using red cotton embroidery perle. That looked ok, but when I held the tundra scene over it, I felt such a need for more red. I used a sheet of photo block, because it was the right color and also let light through, giving some luminosity. The bottom was then stitched to the denim using red French knots. The sides were stitched to the pet screen using linen warp, and to the top using waxed cord. It was finished with six small fringes of red, green, black, and blue cotton perle.

This kind of art piece makes me uncomfortable, which I think is a good process for an uncomfortable topic like climate change in the Arctic. Beginning with destruction, the cutting of the painted screen, sets the stage for expressing some positive possibilities. Yes, some things are broken. Yet loons, who want nothing more than to live their Arctic lives, are still swimming. The fog? Well, it suggests the fog we're in—we who are so much less innocent and more destructive than the loons. The view of the tundra contains the paradox between beauty and danger, and it implies the perspective we need to steer a different course.

This piece received a lot of attention when I hung it at Sebastopol Gallery. I appreciate all that people saw in it, and the emotion and care they expressed in its presence.

Thunder Woman in the Far North

As I continue to explore healing in the Arctic as a key to averting climate catastrophe, it's natural that a powerful spirit guide would appear. Thunder Woman in the Far North (watercolor, 20.3 x 15.5") stands on patchy ice at the edge of the Arctic Ocean. Snow flakes are falling from her outstretched arms. In the mystery of the aurora, she invokes cold, healing, and protection of Arctic species. Through invisible connections extending across the regions of the earth, she touches life everywhere.

She touches life everywhere because the conditions of the Arctic effect every place and every being.  Mysterious when she first appeared in my imagery, Thunder Woman soon revealed herself as the spirit of native uprising. Native uprising doesn't mean armed conflict,  but a return to sacred relationship with nature, as practiced by native people of all times and places. It is exactly this native spirit that can save the Arctic, the climate, and all beings.

Last night I attended a concert with Väsen, a trio of master musicians from Sweden. I don't know their personal beliefs about climate change, but the raw beauty and profound mystery of their music breathes the healing power that answers our longing and our prayers. 

The musicians of Väsen hail from Uppsala, only about 6° south of the Arctic Circle. I'm sure they've been touched by the Aurora all their lives, and that northern wildness runs in their veins. It certainly runs in their music, and it surged through me as I listened and witnessed the great love and humor they bring to the stage.

As news about climate change worsens, I struggle with the question of how to respond, as a person, a mother, an artist. In concert with Thunder Woman, these musicians help me understand that our answers lie in beauty and joy. 

Polar Song

Polar Song

The 5th in my Arctic series is Polar Song, a watercolor, 8.5 x 11", completed in April. Like all sentient beings, polar bears have their own songs. This bear is singing a plea for her survival, the survival of her kind, the survival of her beautiful world. I have expressed it in the poetic form, tetractys: 5 lines, the first with 1 syllable, the second with 2, the third with 3, the fourth with 4, and the last with 10 syllables.

white

polar

queen of cold

she sings, she pleads—

defeat progress for sanctity of life

I've begun to talk with scientists and others about the journey from the mess we're in to a viable way of understanding our world and our role. Lauren, a fluvial geomorphologist, told me of a trip to the Firth River in the Yukon, nearly 10 years ago. Even then "soil was hemorrhaging" out of the melting permafrost. Shuli, a strategy consultant, has studied how flood-devastated communities find a viable future amid chaos, as well as how they ignore hard choices. 

To avert climate catastrophe, fundamental changes to our economy and beliefs about knowledge are required. Some very unusual alliances need to emerge. Progress must be defeated in a way that tastes like a win. I hope Lauren, Shuli, I, polar bear spirit, and artistic process are all part of the healing.

Praise Ice

The third in my Arctic series, completed in February, is Praise Ice, watercolor, 11 x 8.3". I set a rather pretty scene of ice drifting in a warming sea in a mandala of stars and snowflakes. Since Mount Saint Helens erupted in in 1980, I've painted passages of night sky to remind us of the vast mystery beyond our tiny world. The snowflakes are reverse painted in red, implying the heat that endangers them. I want the piece to hold a balance between alarm and love, tragedy and beauty. I want it to be bold enough to awake resolve and peaceful enough to support our strength to act.

Painted in light blue below the mandala is a poem written in the traditional lanterne form: 5 lines of 2, 4, 6, 8, and 2 syllables, resembling a lantern shape on the page.

arctic

methane threatens

quietly beauty melts

becoming deadly, so deadly

praise ice

In the poem too, I seek the balance between loving the world and calling action to protect it. These are challenging times, and I hope my images and poems contribute to finding solutions together.

I'm currently reading Hot by journalist Mark Hertsgaard. It contains much bad news about climate chaos, but the birth of Hertsgaard's daughter Chiara in 2005 spurred his commitment to a livable future. I'm inspired by all the collaborative and far-sighted measures he cites—such as those in Seattle, Great Britain, and the Netherlands. As I read, I'm gathering a sense of guidelines for how we can come together, globally in principle and locally in practice. He says, "I make a conscious effort to avoid despair, for despair only warps thought and paralyzes action."

I look forward to smoothing thought and energizing action. Meanwhile: Praise Ice.

Arctic Prayer

My second exploratory image in the Arctic series began almost as a doodle in my sketchbook: light, free, humorous. I liked it so well, though far from "serious," that I repeated and refined it on a sheet of Fabriano watercolor paper.

The result, Arctic Prayer, is 11 x 16". Yesterday I cut mat board for it, and will mat and frame it tomorrow. I begin to imagine a showing of these images at Sebastopol Gallery during our July or September rotation. They're adding up, along with my feelings about them. My dread of our climate situation is gradually tempered by excitement from events like the Greenpeace occupation of Shell's drilling rig, followed by Seattle's official and popular response to their presence in their harbor.

Meanwhile, I begin to find my way into dialog with other players. I received an encouraging email from Dahr Jamail. I discovered a photographer friend, Don Jackson, actually printed the banners Greenpeace used in their Shell action. Another photographer friend, Brian Cluer, is a fluvial geomorphologist with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. And a third photographer, Mike Shoys, fellow member of Sebastopol Gallery, is increasingly interested in using his camera for ecological good. All of us are interested in creating an art-science collaboration.

In the whimsy of Arctic Prayer I see animal hope. We are not separate from the rhythm of caribou as they dance, feed, and migrate in harmony with currents of air, water, soil, and ice. Their longing for health and duration touches us across the great mystery. May they guide our thought and effort.

Another Dark Love

This is the second study in The Warning Song of the Arctic set loose by Dahr Jamail's article, "The Methane Monster Roars." It's a small watercolor, 4.5 x 7", called Methane Boils. It shows one of the places in the arctic where methane pools are bubbling through the melting permafrost.

One aspect of climate challenge that I feel strongly and haven't learned to navigate, is avoiding so much darkness that we seal a bad fate, while facing the darkness that must be brought to light and love if we're to transform ourselves and our habits. There must be light, there must be love, and there must be unwavering truth. 

Weeks earlier I attended a lecture by Naomi Klein, which inspired a lot of beautiful energy, hope, and the following poem:

another dark love

the climate is changing. seasons

rearranging. the specter of venus haunts

hydrocarbon dreams. no one believes

the disaster of 4-6 ° centigrade, the apocalypse

of a few drowned cities.

we all know how much worse.

the savviest liberal is hardly more realistic 

than the bible capitalist.

we scurry like denial ants, each with our

destined grain of sand.

& yet the breath of earth stirs us.

the winds of trees penetrate the gossamer

of unending connection. engineer to grub

to crab grass to salmon to bread mold to 

melting icicle to water rounded stone.

there is a voice singing inside every.

there is a hearing within the vast deafness.

aberrant cells in the sweet earth body,

we bend & shudder to some collective immune

response that calls us back, calls us.

greed is not the inner nature of any human being,

nor any kind of being. shark & wolverine

& kudzu vine are more complex, ambiguous.

even the corporate ceo fracking us to hell

is a patchwork story with unpredictable twists.

the sun doesn’t feel so warm now as threatening.

what happened to double hung windows & a thousand

clever passive devices lost to witless technology?

screw the supply side. whittle the demand to

so little even a chickadee is cradled.

she is calling, she is calling. maple winds &

supersized hurricane waves become symphonic. 

someday the dance teacher will no longer strike

the iridescent wings of a wandering fly. the oil magnate

will protect tars sands flora with his life.

all the things we have to have

become a joke, obscene but easily forgotten.

to touch lichen growing on bark brings us to our knees,

worshipping & awed. glaciers can grow again,

only one venus circling our sun.

The Warning Song of the Arctic

In January, Dahr Jamail published an article in Truthout: "The Methane Monster Roars." Over decades of creating art to benefit our relationship with nature, I've become quite alarmed about climate disintegration, and was aware of the threat of methane being released as the Arctic sea bed and permafrost are melting. Nonetheless, the way he wrote this article grabbed me by the soul.

He began by observing ferns in Olympic National Park: "the delicate geometry of frost-covered ferns. White crystalline structures seemed to grow from the green leaves, encasing them in a frozen frame of temporary beauty." From there he moves into grave concerns and a terrifying array of scientific data. I vigorously recommend this article.

Immediately I turned my pencils and brushes northward. What can I paint to keep this pivotal land and water frozen? There is no immediate answer. There is the beginning of a journey of exploration. Pictured is the small watercolor, "Frosted Ferns," 7.8 x 5.3", that was my first step. Many others have followed, and I intend to post them here regularly.

I'm looking for allies: artists, scientists, grievers, healers. I see no ordinary way to prevent the disaster that's hurtling toward us. So please, let's invent an extraordinary way.

Earth-centered Amazing Grace

I visited Susa Silvermarie's website recently, and found these beautiful lyrics to Amazing Grace:

Amazing Grace, how sweet the earth,
the dirt between my toes,
the sun pours down upon my crown,
the mighty river flows.

Amazing Grace, how sweet the sound
of bird song in the trees,
the air is dense with fragrant scents
soft floating on the breeze.

Amazing Grace the ocean swells,
the waves break on the shore,
the moonlight rides upon the tides,
oh, who could ask for more.

Now we’ve been here four million years
sustained at her sweet breast,
let’s sing her praise for all our days,
then in her womb we’ll rest.

© 1995 by ElIzabeth Cunningham. Reprinted by permission. For more information or permission to reprint: www.elizabethcunninghamwrites.com

                      

Wouldn't it be wonderful to hear these lyrics sung, often and everywhere?

An Artist's Spiritual Inquiry (Part 4)

I’m not particularly deliberate in the way I paint. Not too much, “I’m going to paint such and such.” It’s more, “Great mother, show me what you want me to paint,” or “Salmon spirit, move my hands to create what you need to be seen.”

I think more about smaller spirits and spirit guides than I do about God. St. Francis had it right, seeing God’s face everywhere, in birds, in tea cups, in daisies on the hillside, in the hill itself. Theories about God don’t move me very much, intimacy moves me. My paintings are about intimacy. So are my poems, just another medium for the same family photos.

Loving God is inseparable from loving earthworms, clean creeks, unpolluted clouds. Being loved by God is inseparable from receiving, feeling, the love willows, jays, thunder give us. 

Ecological restoration isn’t just about the material changes we need to make to protect life and health. It’s also about emotional relationship with other beings as equals, as guides, as benefactors. This is the ancient way humans interacted with land and its inhabitants in every culture that has endured sustainably for centuries. It is the new way that will save us. It is also the way of spiritual intimacy with god, however we name, imagine, or worship  timeless being.

An Artist's Spiritual Inquiry (Part 3)

This shift was a great spiritual deepening for me. It had come a few years after I woke one morning feeling a great, vast, infinite even, female presence, who whispered to me the the dawn light: It is not wrong to believe in me. This was the goddess insinuating her way into my fairly disciplined Zen practice. But as I wove together Zen, goddess presence, ecology, art, parenting and gardening, I was taken on a journey whose landscape almost eluded me for much of the travel. 

By the time I saw my work as serving the earth’s healing of us, I was getting my bearings. I was fully immersed in belief in the consciousness of all beings and even all things. What Zen Buddhists call Emptiness, Christians call God, and pagans call the Great Mother is the totality of consciousness, matter, energy, space—manifested perfectly in everything from saints to grasshoppers.

So earth healing art becomes a matter of celebrating family. All our relations.

My spiritual practice is to pay attention to the movement of spirit in the natural world. I don’t just mean wilderness and magnificent species like salmon and eagles and pronghorn antelope, however important these may be. I’m loyal as well to the wilderness of my small town yard, the spider in my sink.

I heard a Pomo man say to a group that to understand the native view of nature, you would have to feel, when a tree is cut down, the same way you would feel if your brother were killed.

That’s what my art is about. I was raised by trees and went out into the world with that much grief and horror when a tree is cut down. I went out understanding that nothing belongs to humans—not the land, not the water, not consciousness, not playfulness, not invention, and certainly not sacredness.

An Artist's Spiritual Inquiry (Part 2)

As I considered the underlying causes of ecological destruction, I noticed that the idea that art passively expresses what a society or culture is up to isn’t the whole story. No, art actively prescribes what a society or culture does by affecting what its members can see as real. I saw how art, particularly the art celebrated in our art history books, museums and galleries has played an important role in creating the kind of consciousness that destroys its habitat.

Crisis solved: my role in environmental protection, my form of ecological activism, was precisely art. I committed myself wholeheartedly to a career of creating art that would change that consciousness. To whatever extent lies in the power of one individual, I would nudge our culture toward the paradigm of ecological healing and sustainable harmony. 

At first I took a somewhat political approach to what such art would look like. I felt the urgency of stopping pollution, saving rainforests, decommissioning nuclear power plants. At some point, I began synchronizing my artistic process with ritual. I began each studio session with meditation, then an intention that the work I was starting would somehow, mysteriously, be healing to the earth. Then I worked. I gave myself to trusting that spirit presence I was experiencing more frequently: it would guide my work into a form that was needed.

After a time of working this way, I was one day dumbstruck by the hubris of seeking to heal the earth. I laughed out loud at the absurdity. We’re the frickin’ disease! By that time I had a personal, visceral awareness of the vast consciousness of the earth and her life forms. I reframed what I sought to do as an artist: to serve the earth in her efforts to heal us. To heal us crazy humans so that we might return to harmony before destroying the many species dependent with us on the very conditions we’re so determined to destroy.

An Artist's Spiritual Inquiry (Part 1)

I began to paint and draw seriously at about the same time I first had woods to wander in at leisure—about 6 or 7 year old. Until I was 12, the time I spent there was so vital that I often say I was raised by trees. The viewpoint I’ve brought to almost everything is unique in my family and society, but quite common in the family and society of forests. Ecological values entered my bones and my soul sitting at the knees of my wise elders, the trees.

The various storms of adolescence and young adulthood blew me through some religious experimentation, especially with Catholicism, atheism, Buddhism, and ancient goddess religions. Zen Buddhism, modified by pagan goddesses, influenced me over the long haul. But over the years the wisdom of the forest has become the prime measure of spiritual truth.

When I look around the world, taking in its vast suffering as well as its unfathomable beauty and persistent joys, I conclude that the most important spiritual question facing our culture and our species is how to restore harmony with the rest of nature, with all the diverse members of the family of life. I include in this beings that our culture doesn’t usually consider living, like stones, rivers, the underground seep of water, the wind and clouds.

The urgency of the environmental crisis came to me early. Raised by trees, I was aware of the degradations of development before I reached my teens. I saw it with my own eyes, without anyone mentioning it. By the time I was in college, many people had noticed the urgency, and created Earth Day. This public expression prompted a personal crisis: how could I be an artist (which was all I ever wanted to be) when the world desperately needed saving?

Wolves Running 2 - Acrylic Painting

Here's the finished acrylic version (24 x 36") of the orange wolves, our gifts to the world. I find it a little shocking in its unabashed orangeness, but the strangest people love it. Including my super-critical young adult daughter & a very distinguished elder woman. 

What's always interesting about being a little shocked or even downright disgusted by a new painting is that the sensation is completely non-informative about the quality of the work. Misleading even. While the artist may think that the painting is bad, we've simply failed, often it's just that the painting is ahead of us. When we catch up, the painting is suddenly beautiful.

I recognize that my beliefs about what's happening in the world & what role I might play are in a particularly rich flux. Books I've been reading—In the Realm of the Hungry Ghosts by Gabor Mate, A Language Older Than Words by Derrick Jensen—are helping me bring this flux to conscious thought.

In the process, how I see this painting changes.

All I have to say right now is this: These running wolves are not hurrying. They are exerting their joyful strength.

Wolves Running

This is a watercolor study (11 x 16.5") of an idea for an acrylic painting on canvas. I chose to try it out in watercolor before committing to canvas because the original sketch was mystifying. Would it work?

Orange wolves carry the meaning of what one gives to the world—the activity of sharing one's talents generously, vigorously. The sweep of night sky implies the great mystery, all that is beyond human understanding. Maybe the wolves understand, or run in harmony with it.The little pennant shapes with elements of life—bone, leaf, snowflake, flower—also suggest the continuity of the particular & the vast. Maybe the message of this painting is that our personal gifts are made in the context of all that is small & all that is cosmic.

I welcome your interpretations.

This painting is on exhibit at Quercia Gallery in Duncans Mills, CA, until May 31. It will be at Sebastopol Gallery later this summer. 

Coyote Wind watercolor, 17 x 22"

 

Last summer I painted this coyote gazing out into what? the future? Whatever it is, he looks happy to see it, so it must be good. The little shapes underfoot suggest the elements of life coyote & we depend on.

 

Earlier this week I hung this painting in a show with Victoria Whitehand at Quercia Gallery in Duncans Mills. Our show is called "Inner Light ~ Outer Music," & is a unique expression of Buddhists wandering in the world.

 

I first met Victoria in 1993 when she was curating an international show of Buddhist art. The following year she invited me to co-curate (the show was annual for 5 years). We became good friends, & for a time walked together every week at Ragle Ranch Park (in Sebastopol).

 

Not long after I met her, she went off north for a 3 year, 3 month, 3 day Tibetan Buddhist retreat. When she returned, she became lama of Gold Ridge Sangha, now called Kagyu Takten Puntsokling. Meanwhile, after 30 years of Zen practice, I drifted into something less definable & more Native (still cherishing my teachers & the Dharma).

 

Victoria's works in our show are bold, nearly abstract caves & canyons: inner light. Mine are mythic animals in odd situations: outer music. Yet they converse with each other. Our colors, our shapes echo, shine & dance together.

 

In the show, you can finally see what coyote is looking at: the glowing light of one of Victoria's beautiful canyons. The music of Coyote, the light of Dharma.

The First Sonnet

beloved friend, you have encountered me

amid a storm of trials & anguished cries,

our leaders fat with ignorance & lies,

this twenty-first, beleaguered century.

the shallowness of people’s goals kills hope.

the beings whom we trust are seen as meat

or measured for their profit in board feet.

we search for kindred souls to help us cope.

along your lines of face my thoughts are curled.

your gentle rain of words renews my heart.

what meaning in this chance our roots have crossed

within the struggles of a breaking world,

when creatures, sacred sites, & faith depart,

this time of blasted lands & species lost?

A Crown of Sonnets

In a recent conversation, my poet friend Hale Thatcher introduced me to a startling concept: a crown of sonnets. 


Sonnets, traditionally, are 14 line poems written in iambic pentameter (5 2-syllable units per line, the 2nd syllable of each is accented), with a strict rhyme scheme. A crown of sonnets is 7 sonnets linked in this way: the last line of the first is the first line of the second, the last line of the second is the first line of the third & so on until the last line of the 7th is the first line of the first.


The heroic crown of sonnets goes further. There are 15 sonnets with the first 14 being linked by last & first lines. The 15th sonnet is the first lines of all the 14 sonnets in order.


Wow, I thought, what a great model for continuity in a series of paintings!


Then, sighing, I assessed that I wouldn't really get that model unless I wrote one.


So I did. Hale & I had also been discussing our fears for the world & our frail hope that our work as artists would somehow contribute to its cure. So beginning in the deep dark of waking one night, I wrote 15 sonnets about ecological trauma & the medicine of poetry & painting. It's called "Corona Gaia" & I'll be posting these over the next few weeks.


I'm making some hand-made book versions & a simple, illustrated chapbook. The image above is the cover of the chapbook.

Fourth Mushroom Watercolor

The fourth mushroom is very common in my backyard in November & December. I pulled up an attractive specimen & laid it gently on my drawing table.

In this 7 x 9" watercolor, I added an element I'd been seeing as I drifted off to sleep: small colored squares coming off the mycelial base of mushrooms in varying patterns.

I like the compositional effect, & wonder what it means. Perhaps the relationship of mushrooms to the building blocks of the soil? A reference to the periodic table?

The quote from Paul Stamets: Under ordinary circumstances nature self-prescribes fungi for its own healing.

How beautiful is that?

Third Mushroom Watercolor

This third watercolor is called "All Habitats Depend." Written around the 8 x 8" tipped square image are these words from Paul Stamets:

All habitats depend directly on their fungal allies, without which the life-support systems of the earth would soon collapse. Mycelial networks hold soils together & aerate them. Fungal enzymes, acids, & antibiotics dramatically affect the condition & structure of soils. In the wake of catastrophe, fungal diversity helps restore devastated habitats.

Last week I wrote about my work with mushrooms in a grant application to Center for Cultural Innovation. I'd love to get this grant. It would enable me to paint BIG mushrooms, to visit Paul Stamets & other mycologists, & to devote a block of time to the project without wondering where the next month's rent's coming from. It's at least one or two orders of magnitude more probable than winning the lottery....

It felt good to clarify my intentions around mushrooms, Stamets' work, & mycological effects on the miracle of biological interdependence. Whatever happens, they were hours well spent. My fungal allies helped aerate & structure my artstic soil.