In my last post I introduced a few worldviews depicting imaginary islands, as opposed to most of my more recent works that have focused in on real places. Here I’ll continue where I left off.
Though I’m always trying to draw attention to today’s environmental challenges by showing the types of places we have to lose, even if the specific locales don’t actually exist to begin with, at the same time I do try to offer at least some temporary escape from those realities through visual experiences of what’s left or what once was. (At least, I’d like to think that these two goals can coexist.) Given the added anxiety and uncertainty that’s suddenly descended upon us, hopefully these ideas and images can provide a refuge in more ways than one.
Flinders Island, Australia
One of my earliest posts delved into my 2017 artist residency on Flinders Island, off the northeast corner of Tasmania. My focus there was Strzelecki National Park, which incorporates a fascinating diversity of endangered coastal and mountain habitats that inspired Sanctuary, my very first fractured composition in watercolor.
Off the coast of Flinders are several much smaller islands including the 125-hectare Big Green Island—a nature preserve known for its nesting bird populations and where invasive rats were recently eradicated. The island’s vegetation, from what I can tell, is relatively uniform and likely very degraded. But, from my experiences in nearby Strzelecki National Park combined with my obsession with ecological zonation patterns, I re-imagined it as rising to higher elevations with arid lowlands and a wet ferny summit.
Big Green Island, off the southwest coast of Flinders, seen from the summit of Mt. Strzelecki. (I didn’t visit the island itself.)
Tree ferns, Dicksonia antarctica, on the hike up Mt. Strzelecki.
Grass tree, Xanthorrhea australis, along the southern coast of Flinders Island.
Islet, watercolor on paper, 18”x24,” inspired by Big Green Island (its outline that is—everything else is invented)
Ecuador
A few of my earlier posts described the surreal páramo (alpine moorland) and polylepis forest of El Angel Reserve, Ecuador, and two works based on it (Páramo and Lagoon). On that trip on 2018 I also visited Machalilla National Park along the central coast of the country, protecting a piece of endangered dry forest transitioning between the rainforests to the north and the deserts to the south; and the primary (i.e. never cut) cloud forest of Los Cedros Reserve on the western slope of the Andes. (This trip also included the Gálapagos Islands, which I’ve posted on a few times as well.)
These semi-arid, rainforest and alpine environments are hundreds of kilometers apart, but Ghost Isle below incorporates them into a single imaginary island. (You could say that the island part brings the Gálapagos portion of the trip into the work as well.)
Pilosocereus cacti in Machalilla National Park along Ecuador’s central coast.
Rainforest in Los Cedros Reserve.
Upper reaches of the forest at the edge of the páramo, El Angel Reserve.
Frailejones (Espeletia pycnophylla) above Voladero Lagoon, El Angel Reserve.
Ghost Isle, watercolor on paper, 15”x17.”
Stay healthy everyone, and take this opportunity to be mentally “present” or “far away” as you choose—I’m always much better at the latter! But I’ll end this post with the here-and-now: some shots from the March 7 Artist Reception for Fractal Plein. (It is still on the walls, though the “now” part is in name only given that everything non-essential in the Bay Area has closed for at least the next three weeks….)
Darren
