“If people think nature is their friend,
then they sure don’t need an enemy.”
~ Kurt Vonnegut
I was once accused of overly romanticizing nature in my artwork.
It was the very first day of our Junior Seminar college art class and I was the first person to have to present to the class what sort of artwork I’d be making that semester. I had been making 3′ tall ceramic sculptures that resembled sea creatures and I loved them, but I didn’t know why I felt compelled to make them. I tried to explain this to my peers and that I wanted to use the coming semester to create more and to actually figure out what the heck the sculptures meant to me. Then my peers were encouraged to critique my idea and as they went around the room, it very quickly snowballed into everyone talking about how nature is so often portrayed as benign and good and romantic when it was actually “red in tooth and claw”. Well, I’m no idiot, but I felt like one and since my ideas were in such a formative stage I kind of freaked out and stopped moving or talking for the rest of that class period, eyes glued to the door knob. As soon as class let out, I ran away and cried about it.
End result? I scrapped the whole project and did something else that I hated.
Luckily, my spirit wasn’t permanently crushed and I let myself create a senior project slowly and true to what was inside me. The piece at right, especially, was created in response to my fellow students who had unwittingly traumatized me by falsely accusing me of creating shallow, nature-worshipping artwork.
You are not a wishy washy sap for thinking that nature is beautiful!
“Terrible” and “gentle” are words that our human minds assign to nature based on how we see it in relation to our own existence. Nature is actually indifferent, but I would still argue that it is beautiful. Beauty is a concept that transcends “good” and “bad” the way that the Buddhist concept of Joy transcends “happy and “sad”.
Nature is beautiful to us, not because it is good, but because it is REAL.
Time spent in nature is meaningful because it’s a return to our true selves. Whether this comes in the form of a home-destroying hurricane or the gentle flutter of butterfly wings through your garden, nature is awe-inspiring. I for one am going to raise my hand and stand up in front of the class for all of us who believe that nature is something worth celebrating, in all of it’s incarnations! Has anyone ever made you feel silly for loving nature? Let us know about it in the comments ๐ Testify!
delivered right to your email inbox? Sign up here!