David Morrison

The art of landscape painting—ever since Giorgione first brought the landscape to the fore as thetrue subject of a painting—has the power to remind people of their relationship to the larger world of nature. Of Giorgione's breakthrough E. H. Gombrich said, "We look from figures to the scenery and then back again, and we somehow feel that, unlike his predecessors and contemporaries, Giorgione really thought of nature, the earth, the light, air and clouds and the human beings as one."

Similar sentiments have inspired my own painting. Unlike Giorgione, however, I intentionally avert my gaze from the direct human impact on the landscape. I do this as a counter-measure to a pervasive anthropocentric world view that often tries to make "nature" an almost irrelevant "other." As the negative effects of human culture—such as pollution and destruction of plant and animal habitats—have increased, it has seemed increasingly important to me to remind people of our truer relationship to the world. The beautiful and complex world of nature, on which we human beings are utterly dependant for our existence, came into being without us. My landscape paintings are, I hope, a reminder of our origin in a fully-formed natural world, our unity with nature, and our dependence on a healthy planet as a platform for all human activity.

The site I have chosen for Project Art for Nature is a section of the Saint Croix River between Minnesota and Wisconsin with which I first became acquainted over thirty years ago. It has occupied my attention as a subject for painting and reflection in the intervening years. Although greatly disturbed by human activities of the last one-hundred and fifty years, it remains a rich and varied natural area with diverse habitats including flood-plain forests, both dry and wet bluff communities, wetlands, mesic forest, and sandbars. It crosses the vegetation tension zone between boreal forest and more southerly plant communities. It provides habitat for two endangered animals, the Higgin's Eye and the Maple Leaf clams. It exhibits great biological diversity in a relatively small area.

This beautiful area, though protected in some measure by its 1976 designation as a National Scenic and Recreational River, is threatened on a number of fronts. One could almost say it is in danger of being loved to death. The juggernaut of suburbanization, with its residential and commercial development and road-building, along with petroleum-based recreation, are perhaps the most serious threats. In addition, invasive non-native species such as the Zebra mussel and Eurasian milfoil are a clear danger to native plants and animals. These and other threats to the biological diversity and the health of the local environment threaten to diminish us all.

Through my paintings, which mostly avert the gaze from human impacts on a highly impacted landscape, I mean to stress the importance of the non-human, the "wild." By suggesting "nature without people," I hope that people will reflect on the relatively small role nature seems to have intended for humans. I hope, too, that people might come away from my painting with the thought "of nature, the earth, the light, air and clouds and the human beings as one."

NEXT ARTIST >

DAVID MORRISON'S WORK