Back to Nature, Back to Myself
There’s an abstract butterfly garden drying on the printer and a mangled mess of colors that looks like an Eighties Condo Sofa was attacked by a small child with a black marker on top of the lamp. They’re drying while I explain algebra on Zoom.
I’ve been fighting with my art for a while now. I have my portable easel stocked with oil paints and brushes and linseed oil. I have my portable container of thinner that fits in my backpack. I’ve dragged both into the Everglades and Big Cypress. I’ve set the easel up on roadsides, in fields, and at the side of a canal controlled by the South Florida Water Management District.
Water and the SFWMD are intertwined in the Everglades and, indeed, the whole of the southern Florida landscape. What was historically a large sheet of water, a slow-moving river so completely hidden by sawgrass and other vegetation it earned the nickname “River of Grass.”
For a while, the main grass of the Everglades was a kind of sedge (Cladium jamaicense) commonly called sawgrass that grows as tall as nine feet in the deep peat soils closest to Lake Okeechobee and as short as one-and-a-half feet further down around the National Park in the marl prairie. Its name comes from the tiny saw-like teeth along its edges. As hardy as it seems though when it’s slicing up your arms and legs, it is very susceptible to subtle changes in the pH of the “river” and the composition of the soils. As runoff from the cane fields and other agriculture changed the chemical makeup of the waterway, so did the vegetation change and the sawgrass was largely pushed out by cattails and other phosphorous-loving plants.
You might think the story ends there, as it does with so many environmental stories. Destruction, then loss, then forgetfulness of how it was before, how it was supposed to be, the ignorance of those who never experienced the before picture. But Florida has spent a lot of money, millions, to attempt restoration to parts of the Everglades ecosystem. They’ve managed to turn the tide, so to speak, on the takeover of the cattails in certain areas and NBA-player tall sawgrass has returned to management areas along Hwy. 27. To do this, they used the same nutrient-loving invasive plants to create a buffer zone to catch runoff and allow sawgrass to once again flourish.
Impressed by the seven- and eight-foot high blades topped with siffles-inducing pollen we found a few months back, I had to dig in and find out how this plant I’d mourned the loss of had returned.
What hasn’t returned is my artistic vision. I keep playing with styles, covering old canvases, layer upon layer until it has the bumps and ridges of lost works rippling through other old attempts. Like a far-less talented Lee Krasner’s gray “mud” canvases as she sought to find her voice at the end of the second world war.
Being outside tempts me to paint nature as I see it. Otherwise, it feels somehow silly to have dragged paints to overlook nesting wood storks or sunsets over a gator hole. Through, artists like Olimpia Piccoli manage to distill the effect of the natural world into an abstract palette.
I find attempts at realism pointless. It’s not just that I’m not as good at them as I maybe should be to even worry about art and vision. Part of that is driving by ADHD and the perfectionism of a near-gifted child who was praised on magical talent rather than effort. I lack the patience to keep adding details until a bird looks as though it could fly off the canvas.
Beyond that, though, realism always feels hollow to me unless it’s welded to a fantastical vison. I have no interest in painting a bird as it is because I have more cameras than a sane person should. I want to express how things feel. The energy of a thing rather than the external presentation of a thing.
My visual artistic journey as a photographer. As a photographer, I could not only capture a scene in perfect realism, but I manipulate images with Photoshop to create endless versions of reality. I just don’t really want to.
Even with the camera, I was bored with the perfection of the digital image and explored techniques involving Polaroid transfers, painting Polaroids, hand-colored monochrome photography, damaged and expired film, unusual filters, plastic cameras, and other things to capture more of a “dream state,” a fleeting interaction between chemistry and the world that wasn’t easily duplicated. Probably an artifact of ADHD, but the more I was able to duplicate a technique or image, the less interesting it became.
Oil paints are somewhat predictable and malleable like photography is supposed to be. Nearly-endlessly blend-able, they seem like the perfect medium for capturing the beauty of a live sunset as the dragonflies settle on the sedges and grasses at water’s edge. They are also wholly impractical for hiking back out of the wilderness as they don’t dry for days.
Something about the smell feels like progress I’m not making, though. Just like it feels like inspiration lies somewhere in the sulfur-scented muck, the dusty gravel access roads, the sweat and sunblock, and the endless variety of pollen keeping the flying creatures busy.
Nature feels intoxicating, addictive. Specifically, the wilds of Florida keep drawing me into the Everglades, Big Cypress, parks, refuges, preserves, and the beaches. In the same way artists of old were once linked to every drug possible, to parties and drink, my brain wants to believe if I keep getting this nature-based high, all the muses will manifest around my canvas. But drinking and drugs have always been more destructive for artists than fueling, especially when they took up too much time.
Probably good that the traditional hiking and camping season has come to a close as the summer rains arrived. Too much time spent chasing dragonflies and hunting for evidence of swamp milkweed is no more painting than an opium fugue state.
We went to Art Walk in Fat Village the end of last month and I found myself drawn in my stippling artist Amanda Yu, the twigs fused to the flower-covered canvases of Heather Neiman and the colorful animals of Stephanie Leyden. And I’ve long loved the defense of nature Stephanie McMillan puts forth in her works criticizing capitalism and environmental exploitation as well as her mixed media works using found natural objects. They all have their own distinct style, in Leyden’s case, separate from the money-generating rainbow-colored pet portraits.
I do my best to generate money by explaining math and writing to mostly middle school students (with some elementary and high schoolers thrown in because my teaching experience ranges wildly). Nothing gives me imposter system more than teaching writing while knowing I have a raging case of writer’s block with my fiction, getting certified to teach English for grades six-to-twelve didn’t require publishing credits. I meet, virtually, so many former online-ESL teachers who do art and craft classes on various platforms, but that is an imposter bridge too far.
I get glimpses of something — images I recognize as former inspiration — under my surface when I’m waking or drifting off to sleep. I just can’t hold onto them or find them again. When my conscious mind reaches out to grab them, they slip away, back into the mental abyss. There’s a story that Salvatore Dali would nap holding a fork that would clang to the floor waking him so he could stay in, and work in, that place between sleep and waking. I might be too deep a sleeper for such experiments. My FitBit sleep graphs look like I dive into the Mariana Trench upon closing my eyes. And no amount of notebooks at my bedside have been able to adequately capture whatever’s swimming around in there.
Though my favorite pieces from my works are those that best captured that quasi-dream state, that place where things are distorted and strangely shaded. I like it when mix-matched things are juxtaposed, when things overlap, when things aren’t what they seem, when things that shouldn’t dance together merge into madness.
The kind of thing that’s much harder to create in a darkroom, especially one crammed into the corner of a tiny apartment bedroom. And on a budget. It takes a few tries to get multiple exposures right on an enlarger. Each exposure needs a certain number of seconds and that requires a test strip (or two or three), but when you overlap them, you can’t just cut the time equally from both because each negative will have a different density.
The kind of thing one could create in Photoshop if one could sit still long enough. But Photoshop is so tedious compared to a darkroom.
I loved the darkroom. The darkness and solitude were certainly a bonus for my introverted little soul, but the physicality of it felt like creating. Dodging and burning by waving fingers, hands, or objects in the stream of light was a kind of painting, a kind of brushstroke. And yet, the secret of what you’d created wouldn’t be revealed without the chemical baths, a precise number of seconds for each, including the one that would allow you to take your creation into the world without it disappearing.
Math and magic dancing together under a giant red bulb.
Yes, darkrooms were environmentally unsound and digital is certainly faster and easier to share and process. Even Clyde Butcher, the Ansel Adams of the Everglades (though that nickname ignores his own feats and expertise), has switched to digital since his stroke. It makes sense. He’s accomplished plenty and he’s lugged heavy large-format cameras into swamps many wouldn’t dare enter unencumbered. He’s printed, in his workshop, masterful works of dizzying size.
Unlike Butcher, I lack consistency. A huge part of that is based in ADHD. Another Medium writer captured, quite accurately, the distractibility and novelty-seeking of the disorder. It makes it terribly difficult to establish a routine either with visual arts, like a sketchbook or other handy practice, or with writing, such a daily word counts or morning pages. Knowing I should only adds to the shame of not being able to actually follow through on either with the tenacity they deserve. Each time I sit down with either feels like starting anew, as I tell myself this is the time, we will form a habit. Only to realize a week later that the notebook I’ve been carrying around has nothing new in it.
I need for these things to be staring me in the face. I need unfinished canvases sitting on an easel where I can see it. I need unfinished paintings taped to the wall or covering a table where I can’t miss them. As soon as it’s “put away,” it becomes forgotten. My brain stops thinking about it, both in terms of remembering it exists sometimes, but also in thinking about what I should do next. My brain stops processing what colors are missing or what layers need work. It’s not that it’s “finished” so much as “done,” by which I mean, it’s not complete, but it ceases to be on my list of things to rotate around to.
This is no way to make art. This is no way to write. This is no way to accomplish anything.
This is how to lower one’s self-confidence and raise one’s sense of failure. This is how to trap someone in a never-ending “block” because the work to get out feels overwhelming and insurmountable.
Art is work. Writing is work. Both require diligence and practice.
But neither provides an income at the entry level like advertising and teaching and answering phones. Thus, they occupy some limbo between what society considers work and what creatives know work is. Society sees creative work as a hobby, a pastime unless one has figured out a way to live on the efforts. Even authors with stacks of books or sculptors with multiple gallery showings find themselves defined as much by day jobs or side hustles as by their creative work.
Chasing income takes time. It is work on its own. Finding a job is a job. And monetizing any interest can lead to disinterest or frustration with the interest no matter how much passion one has initially.
In some ways, sharing creative work is easier than ever. A scattershot collection of digital tip jars, stores, and patronages can keep some artists going. And there will maybe always be pockets of painters carrying canvases through the dirty streets of a city to a warehouse showing a few months before developers spackle over them with high rises and prints of a banana duct-taped to a wall.
Communities can grow across time zones and ideas can spread across cultures.
Yet sometimes all that connectedness feels too stifling, too overwhelming. The noise drowns out the stories and images in my head as bills need paying now and chasing students is easier than hearing the thoughts in the digital din.
Last night I stared out into the swamp waiting for the moon to rise and break through the clouds and haze. On one horizon, lightning flashed sporadically. On another, thousands of fireflies twinkled like fairy lights. In the distance, fire burned out in the Everglades, a massive reddish-orange glow breaking up the Payne’s grey sky. Birds and bugs, frogs and alligators lifted their voices in a night song louder than a city street.
And for a moment, I almost heard my voice.
