When I was a uni student, I wrote a paper in my printmaking class about biophilia and representing nature in art. That was in 2000. Eleven years later Bjork released an album called Biophilia. Biophilia is a concept/ hypothesis put forward suggesting that deep within human DNA is the natural instinct to connect with nature and living systems, as put forward by Edward O. Wilson in his book Biophilia. My paper examined ideas of how artists can represent nature in artwork, when nature is inherently unpredictable and random. Can an artist ever truly represent this or only capture a moment in time?
Sometimes it feels like the experiences that nature provides us with, are living artworks.
Like this...
Aurora borealis over farmlands about two hours out of Reykjavik
Ice cave
Snow on stony ground
Marchesa Luisa Casati famously stated that she wanted her life to be a living work of art. Perhaps in this she was the closest to finding a means of representing nature through artistic expression.
After all, what are our lives but a series of random, unpredictable events? I guess how we choose to represent them is our true art.
If I live my life based on the premise that my life is my art, always a work in progress, always shifting and changing then it's quite exciting to wonder about how the colours and the textures and the lines and the tones will overlap and intertwine over the years...don't you think?
