It’s exhilarating to be lost in symbolic thinking woven into the painting I’ve been calling “Garden” over the years of on-and-off work on the project. An admittedly ambitious undertaking, the Garden of Eden metaphor in this painting has to do with the fall of man, of course … but building on the separation of man from God, is the crisis of separation of man from nature … our disunity with the earth. Always intended to be a comment on our damage to the planet, Garden expresses the potential destruction caused by human supremacy … perceived and irresponsible supremacy …. over the earth. I want to tell this story, and also call on beauty to save the day … reunite us with nature … to grip us and reawaken our divine connection to the natural world. For me, this is the role of art — to bring out our better angels.
Using the auspicious Chinese Dragon symbol, rather than an evil interpretation of the serpent, is intended to convey hope … and faith in the superpower that is beauty. I’m using the Huanglong Dragon, which is yellow, and symbolizes both divinity and the earth. I’m hoping to use the butterfly floral pattern in Eve’s dress, and the plaid structure of Adam’s shirt to connect to a sort of wallpaper construct for the background. The figures and the Dragon will be rendered realistically, and the unifying nature pattern will be more abstracted and stylized, symbolizing our unity with nature, and even though it has dropped beneath the surface of our consciousness, it is woven throughout all creation … as the fabric of life. Well, at least that’s the plan … I’m only a little bit comforted by knowing that our reach should always exceed our grasp ;-) ;-) ;-)
The essay called “Art in a Time of Catastrophe” by Peter Reason and Sarah Gillespie does a wonderful job of expressing this idea — that art has a giant role to play in this time of transition. https://www.kosmosjournal.org/kj_article/the-place-of-art-at-a-time-of-catastrophe/
At such a time, are the arts irrelevant, a luxury? To the contrary, they have an essential place both in grieving for what is lost and in imagining new human possibilities. Facts and figures don’t influence people directly—all science has told us about climate change has had little impact. It is the stories we tell ourselves, the metaphors we draw on, that create our world. The mess we are in reflects the stories that have dominated Western culture: stories of human supremacy, stories that separate humans from Nature, that emphasize economic growth at the expense of human and ecological wellbeing. Stories that we ‘rational’ creatures no longer need stories. Whoever can change these pervasive narratives can change our core beliefs—for better or for worse. Visual art, prose, poetry, music, drama can all help provide space and imagination for new stories to emerge and artful means to express them.
Then, there is art as beauty. Beauty can rip the fabric of the taken-for-granted world, create an opening to a different experience. And art may also offer us a place of beauty that can sustain us through darkness, even make beauty out of that darkness. This is what the poet John Keats was pointing to when he celebrated ‘negative capability’: “being in uncertainties, Mysteries and doubts, without any irritable reaching for fact & reason.”
So that’s the plan for Garden. Here we go …
