Jackson Hole Art Blog

Lately, plein air painter Jen Hoffman has been screeching.  “Scree!”  I suspected she’d mistaken herself for a hawk, but she’s just excited about the National Museum of Wildlife Art’s upcoming exhibit, Birds of Sage and Scree.  Twenty-seven paintings by artist Greg McHuron with correlating text by writer and conservationist Bert Raynes will be on display.  The show opens Thursday, March 4, 2010 and as  Raynes and McHuron wouldn’t think of not having a party, there is one!  The party starts at the Museum at 5:30 pm, with a targeted end time of 7:30 pm.    I predict a packed house.

Are there two more admired and loved men in Jackson? Two figures whose passions are never dimmed, whose work is more purely motivated…devoid of narcissism?  I don’t think so.  Franz Camenzind is the only activist/conservationist/artist who holds a candle.  These spiritual leaders follow their muse, waking up daily considering and honoring the natural beauty surrounding us.  They wonder what they can do next to help it all along, and they don’t think about how they might benefit professionally or politically.

Back to the point, the show.   McHuron’s paintings and Raynes’ text are combined in a book, also titled Birds of Sage and Scree. This party celebrates that book’s upcoming Spring 2010 release, the finish line to a collaborative quest.   All proceeds derived from book sales will benefit the Meg and Bert Raynes Wildlife Fund. That organization’s mission is to “…initiate, augment, or simply fund projects or activities to help maintain viable and sustainable wildlife populations into the future, especially in Wyoming and Jackson Hole, through support of research, education, habitat protection and habitat restoration.”

A Raynes-McHuron collaboration provides an excellent in-your-hands example of the power of connection between nature and art.  Wildlife art nurtures love for, and engagement with, the natural world.  This show and the book are beautiful, and they are a tool.  The exhibition is also an opportunity for NMWA to  “…highlight two long-time supporters of the Museum,” says Museum President and CEO James McNutt. “The show furthers the Museum’s mission to inspire visitors to examine both fine art and humanity’s relationship with nature.”

Raynes, with his late wife, Meg, have been recognized for their dedication to conservation and wildlife issues by the National Museum of Wildlife Art, the Wildlife Heritage Foundation, the Wyoming Chapter of the Wildlife Society, the Wyoming Game and Fish Department, the Jackson Hole Conservation Alliance, and the Town of Jackson.   As the book profile on Raynes notes, he “….noticed that some promising bird habitats with difficult access got (little) attention. In particular, Raynes found that students in beginning birding classes tended to avoid scree slopes and attempting to cross expanses of sagebrush. Thus, birds that inhabit these ecosystems are lesser known. (Raynes) has long thought that these birds should be better understood.”

Greg McHuron especially delights in painting en plein aire in locations ranging from northern Alaska to the Grand Canyon. McHuron regularly participates in the Museum’s Western Visions® show and received numerous awards and special recognition from his peers and the Museum. In 2009, his painting Alpine Flush won the Trustee’s Purchase Award.

“I prefer painting…en plein air as the drama and excitement that occurs all around me is difficult to recreate in a studio environment,” notes McHuron.  “When I paint the rapidly changing scenes, I put into each of them the feelings and excitement that I felt while watching the scene unfold. Years of watching, analyzing and learning from nature’s school ground has helped me to understand the interrelations between organic and inorganic entities and how different lighting, seasons and locations affect how they look and react. If I can capture that particular feeling, I know that those viewing my works will come to feel some of the emotions and excitement that motivated my wanting to record this particular fleeting moment.”

Birds of Sage and Scree remains on display through April 18, 2010.   Phone the Museum at 307.733.5771.

Tuesday, March 3

Art After Hours
Presented by the Dragicevich Foundation
7:00PM in the Cook Auditorium
FREE

It was a century ago when William Hornaday, Theodore Roosevelt, and early members of the American Bison Society (1905) established the first bison reserves. These early efforts were primarily directed at the capture and containment of the few remaining bison on fenced preserves to save the species from extinction. Present efforts to conserve the largest land mammal, the American bison, are far reaching and complex.

In 2006 the American Bison Society was re-established with a new mission directed at the ecological restoration of the species. Keith Aune is Senior Conservation Scientist for the North American Program of the Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS) and works on several conservation issues including ecological restoration of the American Bison.

Aune has been involved in wildlife research in Montana and Wyoming for 32 years. He has conducted field or laboratory research on black and grizzly bears, wildlife diseases, wolverine, cougar, and, more recently, bison. Aune is currently based in Bozeman, Montana, and will discuss the history of bison conservation and recent bison restoration efforts by WCS through its American Bison Society Initiative.
Co-sponsored by the Wildlife Conservation Society.

For information regarding this and other NMWA programs, phone 307-733-5771 or log on to www.wildlifeart.org.

“Extinction—the tragic and permanent loss of entire species of animals—should be a concern for everyone.  This concern and a strong desire to take action toward preventing the loss of more animals has brought about an unusual collaboration between art and science.”— Dr. Kurt Benirschke

“They say that time changes things, but you actually have to change them yourself.”
–Andy Warhol

What is Andy Warhol, that commercial Pop Art, celebrity-worshipping, iconographic urban cowboy doing at the National Museum of Wildlife Art?    When we think of Warhol, we think of repeated images of Campbell’s Soup cans, Marilyn Monroe, Mao Tse Tung, Jackie Kennedy, even electric chairs.  We note, grudgingly at times, our seemingly endless exposure to his more famous commercial images.  And we think, ‘Sod off.  That Warhol guy got lucky.  He became rich and famous by ripping off Campbell’s and Hollywood. He’s nothing but a copycat.  Why is what Warhol did considered art?”

Warhol’s repetition worked, and that is the point.   The need to interpret what we worship, or what we fear and mourn, to recreate externally what our collective unconscious takes in, drives us to create. That is art.  Mankind has always needed to leave markers of our existence, needed to tell our present to the future.  Artists create time capsules, and Warhol is no exception. The America of the 60’s, 70’s, and 80’s witnessed an escalation of manufactured sound bites and media images. Warhol simply recorded this trend and added to it.  We may not like the message, but we cannot deny its reality.  Warhol’s vision of society was, and is, so pervasive that it became what it observed.   It is impossible, now, to imagine those decades when Warhol was at the height of his creativity without Warhol.

Warhol was a transcendent colorist.  He painted and printed all his subjects in sharp, amazing hues of citron, crimson pinks, gold, peach, scarlet reds, deep purples, bottomless blues.  He tricked out paintings and prints so thoroughly, they vibrated.   Born into a working class Pittsburgh neighborhood, Warhol grew up devouring comics, cartoons, and movie magazines.   Doubtless the vivid imagery buoyed Warhol, living as he did in somber-skied Pittsburgh, saddled with frail health.

With a love of color and a yearning to feel alive, rich, and productive, it’s no wonder Warhol took to painting the natural world. Nature includes culture, as the Warhol Museum’s Matt Wrbican notes.   Warhol’s interest in nature was life long.  Physically fragile, he became even more so after being shot by Factory actress-turned-deranged-feminist Valerie Solanas, in an assassination attempt. It can be said that Warhol’s conservation consciousness grew, at least in part, as a result of having to fight for his own life.

Whereas Warhol’s lurid colors render his celebrity portraits as mask-like and impenetrable, his brilliant, earlier images of hibiscus, cows, sunsets, and wildlife take on shimmering life.  This gift for color translates completely in “Silent….  They are raw, and they are eloquent.  And they provide pigmented exclamation points to conservation’s message about borrowed time.

“Silent Spring: Andy Warhol’s Endangered Species and Vanishing Animals” was curated by Pittsburgh’s Warhol Museum in 2002, in celebration of the 40th anniversary of the publication of environmentalist Rachel Carson’s revolutionary book, “Silent Spring.”  That book, and the storm of controversy over pesticide use it created, are said to have set the stage for the environmental movement.  Warhol and Carson were both Pittsburgh natives. In 1983 it was natural evolution for Warhol to accept the commission for “Endangered Species” from Ronald and Frayda Feldman, political and environmental activists noted for their promotion of innovative artists through their gallery, New York’s Ronald Feldman Fine Art. Warhol’s portfolio was the result of a conversation with the Feldmans about ecological issues, particularly beach erosion.  The subject was dear to Warhol, as he owned beachfront property on Long Island, and undeveloped land in Colorado.

In 1986, the San Diego Zoo’s Dr. Kurt Benirschke and Warhol collaborated on the book Vanishing Animals, a collection of 16 Warhol silkscreen and collage prints, reproduced and placed alongside corresponding chapters by Benirschke on each species.  Benirschke gives us each animal’s history and discusses possible reasons for their declining population.  Chapters and prints include portraits of the California Condor, La Plata River Dolphin, the Galapagos Tortoise, the Whooping Crane, and Sommerring’s Gazelle.  Notes Benirschke, “ Naturally, the animals presented here are very personal choices, having been selected from a virtually endless supply of animals whose last hour is rapidly approaching.”

So, what has Warhol contributed to art, and particularly to wildlife art?   He has, say his colleagues, given us back something we may not know we had.   He has brought to the fore our human longing to have the familiar, and precious, codified.  And he has succeeded, says David Hockney, in making a strong connection between those of us who look at his work and the work itself.  Warhol’s prints and paintings go into your head and stay there. There’s no mistaking them for the work of another artist, and that alone can help save a species. I think all who take time to visit “Silent Spring: Andy Warhol’s Endangered Species and Vanishing Animals” this summer shall agree whole-heartedly.   You will come away welcoming and celebrating Andy Warhol as something you never imagined you would:  a great conservation artist.

Tammy Christel’s column “Arts Observatory,” about the arts in and around Jackson, appears every week in the newspaper Planet Jackson Hole.
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(This “Call of the Wild” cover story was published by the National Museum of Wildlife Art)

Innate gifts, properly nurtured, blossom. A garden of artistic aptitude flourishes when inspiration is supplied. Nature photographer Frans Lanting is a case in point.

Lanting grew up in a small Netherlands village, which, over time, was given over to petrochemical and industrial interests. Lanting came to the United States to study environmental planning, in hopes of reversing such erosive trends. The field frustrated Lanting; bureaucracy walled him off even more from the natural world he loved. He moved to California, where that state’s seductive, wild beauty took hold of his soul. Lanting’s passions and artistic gifts found their inspiration, and the photographer set upon the path that has made him one of the world’s most recognized nature photographers.

Frans Lanting’s photographic artistry is described by Thomas Kennedy, National Geographic’s former Director of Photography, as encapsulating “… the mind of a scientist, the heart of a hunter, and the eyes of a poet.”

And, it’s true. Lanting is a naturalist, an explorer, a bit of a scientist, and of course, a master photographer. This fall, his exhibition, “Jungles,” comes to the National Museum of Wildlife Art. His extraordinary collection of photographs, taken around the globe over a period of 20 years, is an impassioned endeavor to depict the “kaleidoscopic nature” of jungles. To capture for his audience the “…glimpses of faces that melt into shadows, the bursts of color and shimmering light.”

But, let’s add another element, “ a conductor’s orchestration,” to Kennedy’s list. Because Lanting’s work is full of music…

Tammy Christel: “In your book “Jungles,” you describe your first night in the jungle as a sleepless one, because of the “tinkling, honking, and whistling” of hundreds of frogs; you use the words ‘crescendo,’ and ‘rhythms.’ Are you thinking of music as you photograph?”

Frans Lanting: “Yes, I often do. I look at images not just as single entities but also in sequences. “Jungles” is an example of that, where these images are strung together, and it becomes a visual experience for people in an impressionistic sense; the book isn’t so much about the science, but about the feel of it, as a sequence of a body of work.”

TC: “And “Jungles’” four sections-Water & Light, Color & Camouflage, Anarchy & Order, and Form & Evolution- are separate movements within a single composition.”

FL: “Right. It is interesting you ask about it, because we are in the midst of an ambitious new audio visual production that involves the music of Philip Glass, to be combined from images from a new project called “The Evolution of Life.” The world premier, an orchestral performance combined with a sequence of images, will take place here in California at the end of July.”

TC: “What about Kennedy’s description of you as scientist, hunter and poet?”

FL: “I think there are aspects of all three identities in what I do. I have to know the significance of a place or subject, and scientists are my best friends. They go on field trips with me, I talk to them, and I read what they write. But, I need to get out in the field myself, and make things work on the basis of solo encounters.

A hunter’s mindset is important, in terms of being opportunistic, but you must also be very responsive to your subject. You have to get within range, you have to gain trust. All apply, and not only when you are working with animals. You encounter similar circumstances with landscapes, or with people.

Ultimately, an image has to work. Timing, preparation, the logistics of going into a place and finding things potentially worth photographing, it has to come together as a final image. It has to do something to people. Move them.

That is where the lyricism–the poetry–comes in, in an image’s metaphorical and symbolic quality. I like to think of my work not just as capturing things specifically, but allegorically, and conceptually.”

TC: “I am struck by your discovery of graphic detail–the minute textures and patterns of the jungle. Many of your photographs remind me of abstract art, or textiles. This is true whether we are looking at ‘Raindrops on a Leaf ‘in Peru, climbing vines, red and green macaws–all are alive in themselves. Everything is, in a way, interchangeable. In your jungles, the Amazon Basin’s Rio Torre is a slithering, creamy snake, a pale tendril. A rain forest at sunrise could just as well be vaporous, sun-kissed cumuli. Bird of Paradise feathers are cockleshells. A glass-winged butterfly is from Tiffany.”

FL: “Yes, absolutely. What I’ve tried to do with ‘Jungles’ is summarize and interpret the experience of being in a rain forest. The overwhelming sensation when you are there yourself. There is texture and detail everywhere–photographically, however, it is very difficult to capture in its totality. So the images are often impressions of details, and from that we build a larger view of the forest.”

And then, there is the human element. Lanting exposes humanity in the natural world. As a chimpanzee stretches, we see a dancer’s warm-up exercise. A fairy tern is an ascending spirit; a chameleon’s eyes hold Aristotle’s wisdom.

Lanting agrees that he is trying to connect people with nature in a positive way, via composition, and universal artistic principles.

“We can’t deny that connection,” says Lanting. “It is really the reason we like anything that has to do with animals. I try to express a creature’s individuality, so people think that this is not just any ape, any frog–this is an individual creature with its own existence and spirit.”

Going out on a lowland forest limb, I tell Lanting that his camera’s eye brings us so intimately close with Jungles’ creatures, it seems we are nesting with them, verging on entering their very beings.

“I’ll leave that particular interpretation to you!” laughs Lanting. But I appreciate what you are saying. I regard it as a great compliment. I try to be a portrayer of creatures needing an interpreter. So that is good.”

END