Nature as Muse

When I was growing up we lived in a rural setting where I had access to meadows and fields all around our house, a small apple orchard adjacent to our yard, and several ponds across the street where there was a dairy farm. We skated there on the ponds in winter and I explored the meadows and fields pretty much on a weekly basis in summers (by myself) — always collecting little bits of this and that and stashing it all away in shoeboxes.

It was on these little jaunts that I first learned how to use a camera with film and when I first started drawing in sketchbooks while sitting under giant weeping willows whose trunks creaked in the wind, all nestled alongside a huge pond. Traversing the fields was a set of railroad tracks and at night, with the windows open, (because we didn’t always have air conditioning) we could hear the wonderful sound of the train whistles.

I loved poking around in the fields looking for seeds and feathers, birds eggs, pods, and cool rocks and stones. At night I loved looking outside my window into the blackness of our backyard, which, butted up to a big meadow. We had owls and woodchucks, raccoons, opossum, and other animals traveling throughout the backyard — lit only by the moon. The leaves on the trees always looks so silvery to me late at night when everyone else was sleeping but I was awake quietly looking outside. The shadows of the trees were big and imposing but I thought they looked like a pretty cool painting. One without color — but with lots of silver.

This piece from the VISIBLE show at the Brushwood Center at Ryerson Woods remind me of some of those experiences of my youth, as well as of a rekindling of the excitement I feel even now today when I’m inside a real-life beautiful landscape. Even just talking about it, thinking about it, and writing about all this makes me feel good, which is a boon to my own well-being. Such is the beauty of nature and of art.