What the...?

Thanks for asking.

An Anonymous Someone commented on my last post:
" Personally, I think the word for that is 'rapacious'.
It is the basest of base behaviour in animal life. There is some artistic value, perhaps, in depicting it in avian subjects' dining habits, but I would seriously ask myself "Why am I showing this to people?" if I were you."

And I’m so grateful, not just because it means that people are reading this and willing to jump in and discuss, but also because it allowed me to spend all of yesterday thinking about food.

I agree with Mr./Ms. Un-Named, insomuch as I think that I should ask “why am I showing this to people” more vigorously of everything I make. And I agree that feeding is the most basic of activities; but I draw that distinction between “basic” (read: natural and necessary and central) and “base” (definition: vulgar or ignoble). Ain’t nothing ignoble about fueling the living engine.

And I guess that’s just what I want to address by painting these feeding, feathered engines, and I’m grateful that this question led me to realize that there IS something I want to address. There is, there is.

Because what could be more essential, flawless and natural than To Eat? And yet, what could we modern humans be more divorced from than our food, our apetites? This is something that I think about even more constantly than I eat or paint; our relationship to food, our relationship to food sources, comsumption, nutritional politics, food production politics, food packaging, food transport, genetic modifications and eating disorders and rooftop gardens and pesticides and fad diets and multicultural food-tourism and fear and hunger and also how much I adore anything with tomatoes in it, and garlic.

I’m as confused as anyone else when it comes to how to fix our fiasco of a modern feeding/eating culture; I only know enough to break into a cold sweat after watching Supersize Me (especially the segment about the diets of kids in public schools) or reading The Omnivore’s Dilemma or considering the simultaneous explosions of malnutrition and obesity. But while I sweat, people more trained and visionary than me are doing all sorts of things to bring us back in touch with the production of our food, to put us back in touch with our bodies and what their twinges and mumbles mean, and to bring back the native and sustainable.

I can't pick between all of the links about malnutrition and world hunger and the terrible divisions between the underfed and overfed. But for those of us lucky enough to choose amongst food options, here are some concientious folks:

Slow Food is a fantastic movement fighting for connection and intention and wholism, but what about the "slow movement" as a whole? I get all tingly in a good way when I read what they have to say, but I also get a little nervous and then I get on my bike and go do something else. I hope that when I grow up I grow wise enough to truly understand the difference between slow, intentional, quality living and laziness or inertia. There is a big difference, I'm sure.

The Sustainable Table is obviously on the right track. And here's a Providence group called Urban Greens offering local options and smart shopping and all that.

And don't forget the risks that go along with all of our foody options, like packaging and the to-go culture.

And then there are people dealing with the history of food itself, the archiving and preservation of local plant varieties and the foods and cultures and even stories that go along with them:

Plant Cultures is a pretty awesome browse, tying families and stories to the botanical particularities of their
Places...

And the Traditional Seeds project is looking at keeping things on the up and up in agriculture.


But I’m getting over my head and ahead of myself by going so quickly into gastro-political hoopla. Painting a starling eating a fig can’t really be considered an activist cry for a reduction in food packaging.

On a more basic (base?) level I am just thinking of the simple relationship of an individual to his or her apetite. Our consumption and how it relates to need.

How are you going to live, and what will sustain you?
Do you eat when no one’s looking, and can you taste anything?
Do you know what fuel truly suits you, and can you get what you need?
Can you feed someone else, while you’re at it?
Why does the fulfillment of healthy apetite look like greed, and why are we chowing down figuratively and physically on That Which Won’t Ever Satisfy?
Oh gosh, that’s not just about food is it?

Much as I said in a previous post that Psychogeography seems like the study of just about Everything on Earth, the idea of food and apetite seems to relate to just about Everything on Earth.
What’s not about hunger or fulfillment?
Psychogeography?
Anonymity?
A ham sandwich?

It seems to me that nothing could be more pure, and more illustrative of a system that’s NOT broken, than the image of something that lives in the air eating something that grows on a tree. The bird’s apetite not warped to either extreme by gluttony or by shame, nor detached from the natural by food processing or an imported diet.

Ahem. No way am I going to go into the fact that Starlings are this imported species that aren’t supposed to be in the US at all, and who may be diminishing the food supply for other native species, because then we’d have to talk about Bush’s “guest worker” plan and that immigration raid that just happened in New Bedford… plus it was human collectors who brought the Starlings here, not their own decision… so let’s just say that my Starling appears in a European tree, very much at home.

I would, however, like to go further with the food/hunger/apetite conversation using the bird as vehicle by thinking about bird feeders, human handouts, geese who eat french fries, etc. How even those species who didn’t invent fat free mayonaise can still find their diets and expectations altered. As an aside, when I was in Aruba I went out on a boat and saw great frigate birds and fish of many and improbable colors. The crusty Dutch gent who owned the boat gave us these sandwiches of thick cheese on buttered Italian bread, and as the sun softened them and made the butter both delicious and probably dangerous, we ripped off chunks and threw them into the water. The frigate birds swooped down, competing with gulls and the occasional full-throttle albatross to snatch the chunks just as they hit the surface of the water. At the same time, these uncanny fish with green, triangular bodies and what looked like HORNS above their eyes started whirling up with pirhana-like zeal and pulling chunks down, devouring them. So soon there was this salty tumult, fish coming up and birds coming down and chunks of American cheese being swallowed into both sea and sky and I was completely shocked and taken aback by this thought:

Those Fish Are Eating CHEESE.

Like, we’re out in the midst of the balmy southern Atlantic, and here these creatures of the deep who would never, in any of nature’s wildest plans, have met a cow on their own accord, are consuming dairy products. I mean, that’s just crazy to think about, the kind of thing that suddenly seems likely to change the very rotation of the earth. Is nothing beholden to nature anymore in our reckless, seafaring and melty-on-top world? I think it’s worth saying again: those fish were eating cheese. Someone should paint a picture of THAT shit.

On a different note, when I was a kid I saw a Cormorant swallow an eel. This is most likely something that happens from time to time. Cormorants are these fascinating, tar-black diving birds who can go underwater for upwards of a minute, surfacing somewhere entirely new with a facefull of fish. Sand eels live in the shallows of the Cape waters, and probably seem like a good catch to a fast bird. But in this particular case it didn’t go well… the cormorant took the eel down gradually in three or four exaggerated, gulping motions and then it seemd to get stuck. It was too long, or too alive. The cormorant's head and neck began to sway and swivel at the whim of the writhing eel inside. I don’t know how it worked out but the cormorant paddled away like that, appearing distinctly more like it was dancing than choking.

I’m not sure what that opens up a discussion of. Perhaps of what you take in, and what it may in turn take out of you. That you are what you eat, or at least move like it.

Anyway.
Thank you Anonymous. I’m having a grand old time thinking about all of this, and it turns out that I do see a great value in portraying feeding habits in art, so much so that I might actually bust out a bunch of paintings of JUST food.
But that’s totally just me.
Does any of that strike a chord with anyone else?

And now for someone completely different

My new friend Natalie Wright does good works of all sorts. Here's to her. And here's a link to her Pancake Dinner site:



Her work spans a lot of media and styles, including textile design and painting, but all seems characterized by intentional, unusual color and a feeling of DIRECTNESS, both in the mark making and in the content. There's lightheartedness here, as well as plenty of concerns and wonderings. Natalie's work is Trying, as is she. If you visit her site you'll not only find good work but also a load of great links to environmental and humanitarian groups working in fields from green housing to food activism to plant culture archiving. Fantastic browsing, hopeful and big.

The images below are links to her flickr set of drawings, paintings and prints.



Another of her flickr sets features her crafts and handmade pillows. Her pillows are great and tend to portray, in felt, specific cuts of meat, or eggs on toast and the like. Which is great because nobody doesn't like a meat pillow, and all the more intriguing when you consider that Natalie is a dedicated vegan. I don't get the feeling that they're protest pillows, but perhaps they're pillows with questions.




Yet another set on her Flickr site is called "Life is good" and features very simple photos that are startlingly convincing.



You know. Life good, Natalie Wright good.

Good day, then.

Um.

Took a bit of a break. Got a little reluctant.
But then the daylight got saved and the thaw came down, and I remembered my apetite for showing and telling and I wanna show and tell a few things.

First, MY things.

I took some shots of what I've been up to within my stripe-wild room, as well as outside of it. Yesterday was the first day in a while that felt warm enough to run extension cords and withstand splinters in bare skin, so I hauled my haul outside for a some long, loud hours of sanding. Hand sanding, block sanding, orbital plug-in sanding. The orbital sander is a crucial part of my makin' and breakin' process- it gives me great powers of subtraction, invents texture and time, and shoots me forward into the next phase of painting: putting back details that I shouldn't have taken out after I get carried away and let it veer out of control all over the surface.

Here are some of my fragments and sentences outside, next to the rake and the hose and the recycling (not pictured).



And here's half of a divided woodpecker, finally maturing and showing his grain but still in need of lotsa adding and subtracting.


And some nature, getting all up on my stuff.


Back inside, I'm excited about a starling that's excited about a ripe, spilled-open fig.

This is another piece I'm constructing out of two halfs: bird dropping in for fruit on the bottom half, and the extended wing in mid-flap on the top half.


And what if the top wasn't the top nor the bottom the bottom, but rather they were reversed, or shown side-by-side? It's possible.

I've just barely gotten going on this piece; it's loose.
The real action for me, here, is the addition of food. I have wanted for a long time to paint birds feeding... diving in for rind, flesh, and zest, pecking, peeling and devouring. I pictured over-ripe fruit of all sorts, an embarassment of seeds and goods, sharp beaks and beating wings and tearing and stripping. Leaving cores and stones and a mess, fructose-drunk. It proved amazingly hard to find references of birds feeding really exuberantly. Starlings, at last, have turned up in a number of photos. Apparently they are the hungriest, and the fondest of fruits like quince and plums that get real red and hot and gory.

I'm not sure why, but this is precisely what I want-- images of things that swoop down and pull the pulp out of other things, get their beaks shiny with juice and keep their eyes wide open.
I don't mean for it to be violent, though it's hungry.
I'm not interested in painting the owls with their mice, let's not even talk about it. I just want to tear fruit to shreds.

I have several sketches going and this one painting started, and it seems like there's a good chance they'll come out like I mean them to.
I guess it all depends on how you look at eating, especially the eating of things portrayed at about 5,000 times their actual size.
I guess it's possible that watching the big, vivid and vigorous Eating Of Things might at first seem gluttonous, or might seem like too much, over-large, again like watching those men who pull trucks with their teeth. Or women who pull schoolbuses with their teeth. But then you watch for a little longer and realize that it's perfect and that maybe it's really all there is in life, filling your belly and picking things up and putting them back down in other places and then filling your belly with something new that you found in that other place after you put the first thing down and before you pick up the next thing, which might be an airplane because once you've picked up a schoolbus you can probably do whatever you want. And eat whatever you want.

I think I could paint birds feeding on colorful and pierced things and the images wouldn't wouldn't be vicious or greedy, they would just be about getting what you need.


Whatchoo think?