The worldview I’ll talk about below, finished a few months ago, represents a bit of a personal milestone. It’s based on the same place that inspired the “archetype” of the fractured watercolor works that I now make exclusively; essentially it’s a re-thinking of that earlier work, and I can’t help but compare the two in terms of complexity, scale, approach, and, well, skill level (or maybe it’s confidence level?).
Sanctuary II, watercolor on paper, 36”x44.” Reality is rotated roughly 180 degrees (with north to the bottom).
The National Park is made up of two disconnected sectors—one containing Strzelecki Peak, the park’s highest elevation, and the other (much smaller) one on a peninsula containing Trousers Point. The park is squeezed into the southwest corner of Flinders Island between ocean and farmland, covering only about 1/20th of the island’s total area. Mountain Seas sits between the two sectors; the larger one is literally in its backyard. The dashed lines trace my three hikes through the park and adjacent natural areas. (Image from Google Earth; north is up.)
The place is Strzelecki National Park (and surroundings) on Flinders Island off the northeast corner of Tasmania, where I did a month-long artist residency at Mountain Seas Art and Wilderness Retreat in the fall of 2017. Two of my earliest blog posts went into both the place and the original work, Sanctuary (read here about the residency experience and Flinders Island in general, and here about the National Park and how Sanctuary came about), so in this post I’ll be relatively brief with the background. But I do want to emphasize again the amazing ecological diversity of the park’s landscape—as usual one of the main draws for me—and also the incredible-ness of the overall experience. (Even with a lot of rain and the water being too cold for swimming in September, idyllic is the only way to describe it.) So I can’t resist sharing a bunch of photos again, even though you might’ve seen a few of them before.
View of Strzelecki Peak (in the clouds) across the bay from the peninsula at low tide.
Dry eucalyptus forest with tree fern “gully” along a stream in the low elevations of the park.
Low, scrubby forest covers the rockier areas of the park. Strzelecki Peak is in the distance.
More tree ferns in a pocket of rainforest approaching the peak.
View from the peak, looking southwest. Below is Mountain Seas, in the cleared area in the center, and Trousers Point beyond it.
One of the many beaches along the south coast. The red color on the rocks, common across the island, comes from bacteria.
Xanthorrhea australis, or grass trees, along the south coast—they tend to prefer rocky or sandy areas. This is a different species of grass tree than the one in the Southwest that I introduced in my last two posts.
Sanctuary, watercolor on cut and layered paper, mounted on wood, 15”x15.” North is roughly to the left. As I mentioned this work kicked off my current series, when I left the oil paintings (also “fractured” but with purely landscape perspectives) and watercolor-and-plexiglass works (purely bird’s-eye perspectives) behind.
In Sanctuary, which I painted during the residency and assembled back at home (it was my one and only experiment with literally collaging the fragments together, i.e. cutting and pasting), the place is heavily idealized. To accentuate the sense of “smallness,” boundedness, and fragility, I converted the park from an ecological island to an actual island. Plus, I completely invented the landscape in the lower right (representing Trousers Point), wishing there had been grass trees in that particular spot.
In the four years since, the worldviews have become a lot more reality-based—they’re still obviously abstract, but I’ve generally tried to keep the spatial relationships between the fragments relatively true-to-life. That goes along with my recent emphasis on depicting “journeys” from one view to the next that reflect my actual experiences traveling through these places. My reasons for the shift are two-fold. First, fitting my personal, idealized experience of a place into real-world geography is a more interesting challenge than being free to invent that geography from scratch—similar to the advantage of designing with site constraints versus a blank slate in a landscape architecture project. And second, as my purpose has become more conservation-driven, I’ve wanted to highlight the threat to real places rather than take a more escapist approach creating the impression that we’ve already lost them.
So I created the new work, Sanctuary II, to try my hand at keeping the real geography of the place relatively intact while at the same time 1) emphasizing the pieces that were most prominent in my own experience and 2) accentuating the internal contrasts between the park’s varied environments as well as the external contrasts between between the park as a whole and the adjacent heavily altered landscapes (i.e. its nature as an ecological island). That was definitely a challenge because, as shown in the diagram below, there’s a great deal that I wanted to include—along three different “journeys.” There are a lot of landscapes that I couldn’t fit in without making the composition too busy, and as I hope you can tell, it was hard to choose! But another reason for wanting to take a second look at the place was that I’ve gotten a lot more comfortable with working large. Almost everything I’ve produced during the past two years or so is 36” or more on one side (easy with oils, much more daunting and logistically complicated with watercolor). That means I can incorporate many more fragments while maintaining or even increasing the level of detail in each.
The work’s three “journeys,” all beginning at Mountain Seas, are generally abstractions of the three routes shown as dashed white lines in the aerial image above (again, with reality rotated 180 degrees). All three are primarily hiking trails but also incorporate some length of road. The first (bottom) mostly follows the two-hour hike to Strzelecki Peak; the second (right) takes in the Trousers Point sector; and the third (top) follows the south coast.
Sanctuary II, detail (area around Strzelecki Peak).
Sanctuary II, detail (grass trees along the south coast).
The three journeys, animated.
Like all of the worldviews with a conservation message, Sanctuary II combines that message with the seemingly contradictory purpose of heightening the empowering, “world-at-my-fingertips” feeling I get from these sharp contrasts within and around natural environments. As I’ve explained before, that contradiction is resolved if I consider these dual motivations to be two aspects of a protective impulse. I’ve recently been thinking about that control-as-protection as a kind of “embrace.” In my caption for this work as it’ll appear in the Proceedings of the International Cartographic Association I describe it this way:
Taking in the specialness of the place—so close to and yet so far from civilization—and of its many facets gave me the feeling of physically embracing the landscape. That sensation came equally from the knowledge that this small, intricate collection of ecosystems will not easily survive the effects of fire, invasive species, and a warming and drying climate.
So this and most of my other recent worldviews have been more involved and, as interpretations rather than re-imaginations of physical places and experiences, more focused on analysis, precision, and problem-solving than earlier works have been. This new emphasis has been a way for me to re-engage myself in some of what I miss from design practice and, frankly, school. I’m hoping future projects will take me even further (back) in that direction.
Darren