Earth Brain

For two weeks I've been working on a new painting.  This one has been a real struggle, the kind that causes one to have frequent thoughts like, "should I just scrap the whole thing and start over?"  or even, "Why did I think I was an artist, anyway?" 
The painting's subject matter is the relationship between the earth and each one of us. As I've worked I've also been turning ideas around in my mind for this post. 

Today, as if to spur me on, I spotted a Pileated Woodpecker drilling on a short tree stump in someone's front yard.  Once nearly extinct, these striking birds have made a comeback.  I'd never seen one before.  I whipped out my handy pocket camera and caught a shot:

Pileated Woodpecker, ©JoyKreves, 2011

What does seeing this bird have to do with my painting?   When I searched "Piliated Woodpecker symbolism" I found this delightful website:  http://www.birdclan.org/woodpecker.html , which lists the bird's attributes as:

-Connection to the earth - That is just what I'm thinking about; the connection of our physical and psychic beings with the earth!

-Ability to find hidden layers - This is exactly the creative process.

-Understands rhythms, cycles and patterns - Clearly, these are necessary artistic skills.

-Warnings - What more important warning could there be than the warning that our earth home is a danger of irreversible damage? This is a theme that runs through my current work.

-Prophecy - Well, I'm honestly not sure yet how this one pertains...

-Associated with thunder - especially pertinent because there have literally been rumbles throughout the week. The storms now are just unnatural in their fury.

-The Earth's drummer - Doesn't every cause NEED a drummer? What better cause to drum for than our earth?

-Pecks away at deception until the truth is revealed - Well, that is just like the process of creating art.  One must simply keep pecking away at the painting or sculpture until its own truth is revealed, and sometimes that turns out to be rather different from what you thought you'd end up with.  If it's good, it rings true.

I wanted to write about the intimate connectedness of our human be-ing and our natural world.  This is what my artwork is about.  I am exploring the question, "What does the natural world have to do with ME?"  I believe that our brains are actually so infused with the landscape that when that landscape becomes degraded we experience suffering. 

Solastalgia, Waterfall Detail, ©Joy Kreves '10

"Solastalgia" is the word for this painful condition, a word coined by trans-disciplinary philosopher Glenn Albrecht, who experiences it first hand as he witnesses the swiftly developing environmental degradation caused by global warming around his home in Perth, Australia.  Naturalist/philosopher, Thomas Berry, was quoted recently in the  NJWild blog:  "Degraded habitat produces degraded humans."  This is the real danger.   
What positive conditions might we humans experience that are directly caused by our deep connection to the earth?  How about another of Albrecht's words, "eutierria", or a sense of existing as part of and in harmony with the earth?

Painting palette for Brain Landscape

Painting-in-progress, "Brain Landscape", photo ©Joy Kreves, 2011

Did you ever marvel at the way the network of nerves in a human body resembles the branches of a finely-limbed tree?  I have. Every level of our physical being seems to have a mirroring aspect in the environment.  Our universe is made up of patterns, colors and forms repeated on both microscopic and macroscopic levels. Artists, whose language this is, have long known that beings and their environments have visual sympathies which reflect a deep organic/psychic union.

I've put aside last week's  troublesome painting and I have embarked upon a new  "Brain Landscape" to more clearly express this idea. The first stage of this work-in-progress is shown in the photo here.  My idea begins with the famous photos of our earth as seen from outer space:  a luminous, watery blue jewel.  I am painting a brain that will have the same luminous water, in rivers and atmosphere. 

To artists and naturalists it is no surprise that a being is intrinsically tied to its environment, and yet those people who deny global warming seem to lack a sense of that connection.  Those who believe the earth and everything on and in it is here for our human disposal are lacking a fundamental understanding of what it is to be human.  Perhaps this is the degradation of humans that Thomas Berry warned about.  We cannot drill for gas, pouring toxic chemicals irreversibly into the earth without devastating results to our precious and limited supply of water.  And we are that water. Our earth has some land, surrounded by vast oceans.  Our bodies contain precious supplies of water throughout.  Here is our problem:  water is a finite resource.  The water that exists is the same water that has existed since the beginning of our earth.  This is an awesome fact.  If we poison it we will not get any more. In poisoning it we poison ourselves, and our beautiful brain landscapes will be degraded into shriveled, water starved environments incapable of supporting the eutierria that we require as healthy individuals. The rivers and oceans that make our life possible cannot come back from the brink of extinction the way the Pileated Woodpecker has.  The earth's landscape can filter out only so many poisons before the toxin load is too great and our ancient water supply is beyond saving.  Every human must nourish their beautiful, luminous earth brain.  Now.