WILD AND FREE By John O’Hern
Three contemporary wildlife artists share their perspectives of the natural world.
The interpretation of the Paleolithic rock art of Europe runs from their being the scribblings of brute savages to their being complex symbols of the interrelationships of the male and the female. And there’s a whole world of theories in between. The 19th-century Duwamish Chief Seattle said, “If all the beasts were gone, men would die from a great loneliness of spirit, for whatever happens to the beasts also happens to the man. All things are connected. Whatever befalls the Earth befalls the sons of the Earth.”
Not much later, the founder of analytical psychology, Carl Jung, wrote, “Thunder is no longer the voice of an angry god...No river contains a spirit...no snake the embodiment of wisdom, no mountain cave the home of a great demon. No voices now speak to man from stones, plants and animals, nor does he speak to them thinking they can hear. His contact with nature has gone, and with it has gone the profound emotional energy that this symbolic connection supplied.”
A hundred years later, artists draw from mythological stories of wildlife, scientific discoveries and their own conscious and subconscious experiences to create their work—perhaps reforming some of those connections or causing viewers to make their own.
Nick Sheehy, an Australian artist working in London, acknowledges the shifting “meanings” of different animals over the course of his life and is loath to “explain” them. “I think it’s better for the viewer to connect some of their own dots, rather than be given a set of instructions,” he says. I ask him specifically, though, about the presence of strawberries in his work, succulent, almost erotic fruit. He answers, “Strawberries [and raspberries] are from my childhood where such fruit grew in abundance. They’re still a homegrown luxury, often eaten at family occasions. A strawberry in a painting might be a reference to family, or it could be a treasure to covet or sustenance to protect, etc.”
When I ask about the form of the animals in his paintings, he replies, “The forms of the different animals are important to the staging of the artwork, and the animals are vague symbols (again with shifting meaning), or are used to express a particular energy, attitude or force. I’m more drawn to common animals that live within the periphery of human life like frogs, pigeons and insects, rather than majestic things like eagles or tigers—those guys are way too symbolically grand. Although, I am partial to a crocodile or two.
“When it comes to depiction,” he continues, “I don’t usually allow myself to get too fussy about an exact likeness, otherwise the artwork becomes too specific to a species—which I think is distracting for the artwork.”
Lauren Marx’s paintings are intensely personal. Brought up in St. Louis where she often visited the St. Louis Zoo and was a fan, as many of us were, of Wild Kingdom on TV. Her grandparents had Audubon prints in their study and she came to love them aesthetically,
the way “he took a scientific thing and made it beautiful. I loved his compositions and the detail of his birds and animals.”
Her The Martyrdom of a Fish is homage to Audubon as well as a challenge to herself to create a long, horizontal painting.
Her paintings recall medieval bestiaries, beautiful, illustrated manuscripts full of real and imagined animals accompanied by moral instructions directing the reader’s attention to the fact that God made all things. She often uses a medieval palette of primary colors with the addition of purple and green.
Marx says, however, “I grew up in an agnostic household, which was uncommon in the Midwest. A lot of the imagery and symbolism in religious artwork helped people cope with things being out of control. As an agnostic, I lacked that comfort. I had to create my own symbols for coping and to make sense of things that are intangible and to be able to move on.”
One of her more striking and enigmatic images is The Struggle of the Apathetic Saint, a double-headed, swallow-tailed kite battling a snake. Beautiful to look at, it demands that the brain begin coming up with interpretations.
For Marx, the golden halos, which she creates with moths, are taken from medieval and Renaissance art and are intended “to show divinity and elevated immortality.” In this painting, the double-headed bird represents her father, a schizophrenic with multiple personalities. “In my mind, there is no God,” she says, “but parents have the ability to be godlike. They create life. The halos indicate they’re above me.” The white and black eggs represent her and her sister, respectively. Her sister was favored by her father and also suffers from mental illness. Marx explains that a pair of swallow-tailed kites, native to South America and Mexico, found their way to St. Louis where her parents met.
As complex and cathartic as her paintings are for her, they bring to the viewer a sense of the beauty and cruelty of the animal world and, perhaps, a bit of her feeling that “every animal is a saint in its own way.” Alexandra Gallagher, who lives in Lancashire, England, brings swallows and their symbolism to her collage Swallow Blind. Sailors often tattooed swallows, symbolic of journeys, on their bodies— one on the outward journey, one on their return. The woman in Gallagher’s collage is blinded by swallows. “On our journey,” she explains, “women follow a lot of built up rules, the bullshit of looking young forever, of always being feminine.
“The narratives in my work,” she continues, “are from a female perspective in Western society. They’re from what I know. There’s a lot of symbology of birds, colors, fruit, flowers. From them I create a narrative to tell a story. It’s my own story but I don’t want to be defined by my history. I want to find a way to work with that but not make it too obvious. A lot of women have these same experiences.”