Wilds

Looking out over the town of Delwara in Rajasthan.

After a bit of a break, I’m back with a post on my most recently-completed watercolor map, Wilds, inspired by various places in Rajasthan, India.

Before I get into it though, an update on what I see as the future direction of this blog. The posts have become less frequent in part because I no longer have a backlog of maps to write about—I’ll keep posting on works as I produce them, but the posts will be more spaced out. As far as the more thematic, less work-specific updates, I’ve decided to transition away from this format and try out a combination of YouTube and Medium. My activity on those platforms will also include some reformulation of previous posts from here, plus posts on new works as they’re created (somewhat in parallel with this blog moving forward). Stay tuned for updates on all of this, on here as well as in my Newsletter for those of you who are subscribed (button at the top of this page).

Wilds, watercolor on paper, 40”x40.”

Wilds out in the wild....

Now, getting back to the latest work—Wilds was an informal commission to capture primarily the town of Delwara, Rajasthan, in my usual multifaceted style, though the work ended up including some imagery from other nearby places too in order to include the right range of material. That’s most notably the case with the views of the succulents (native euphorbias) in the corners. I’ve created a number of maps exploring the human-nature interface, but this is the first one focused on the human side; I knew I needed to bring in some aspect of (at least superficially) native ecology to keep the work in line with my typical theme and passion. But those euphorbia photos came from some distance away from the town, and the “natural” component of the map stayed peripheral (spatially and thematically).

Ancient Jain temple in Delwara.

Street in Delwara.

Euphorbias, somewhere in Rajasthan.

Urban humanity as the focus, "wild nature" on the periphery—but are the two actually distinct?

But that natural component is only peripheral if you define “nature” the way most people do and the way I’ve generally been defining it in these maps—as something perceived as stable and distinct from humanity, and as a result vulnerable and precious. Recently I’ve been seeing the works as reflecting a more multi-layered concept of “natural,” and that additional layer comes from the faceted style of the works in an abstract sense (not the facets/images themselves). While my goal with the faceting has been to sharpen the edges between different views and environments—isolating and “freezing” them in space and time—at the same time I see the pattern of edges as creating a sense of movement and dynamism working in the opposite direction.

As I described in the previous post, on my Lord Howe Island-inspired work Perched, that feeling of movement might on one hand be read as disintegration or an ominous kind of instability—the flip side of the “preciousness” coin (as if these pieces of nature were delicate crystals on the verge of shattering). But I think it could also be interpreted as a less distressing, more invigorating kind of dynamism—as ever-present ecological change due to a combination of human activity and nature’s own processes. This change is itself “natural,” and it erases any clear or firm boundary between humanity and “nature” in the static, pure sense of the latter. With this interpretation then, the urban facets of Wilds are just as natural as the perimeter views, all of it tied together by interconnected flux and flow.

So that’s where the title comes from—city and traditionally-understood nature are both “wild” analogous ways, if wild is taken to mean dynamism, complexity, and interconnectivity rather than timelessness, purity, and separation.

'Wild nature"—conceptually—infiltrating and re-defining humanity from "beyond."

Whether ecological change is viewed as “natural” or “unnatural,” exciting or destructive, depends on the context and who you’re asking. Similarly, I think the sensation of movement in the maps created by the faceting could be read either way, though the pattern of the faceting unique to each one can have a strong influence as well. (And I’m generally starting to use the term “faceting” rather than “fracturing” since the latter is less neutral, suggesting more the destructive kind of change.) While again this interplay isn’t an intentional outcome of the maps, and I don’t plan to begin playing with the faceting patterns to change that, I have started to emphasize these additional layers of meaning when I describe the work. So there’ll be more on them in future posts on here as well as in branching out into other platforms.

Darren