What brought you to create your painting series Poetic Ecologies?

My work has been circling experiences of presence in nature for 40+ years – including questions of what IS nature, within the formal language of painting. This exploration began with painted geometric abstractions while considering the sublime when confronting impactful landscapes --- mostly mountains. Eventually I became aware of my own bodily sensations in those awe states closing the gap of the sublime’s implied separation (larger than, greater than). In 1998, after 25 years of painting non-objectively I reintroduced, recognizable imagery interacting with the felt form of abstraction. At that time, I studied with Jungian James Hillman at Schumacher College in the UK in the course “Inside/Outside Perception, Psychology, Ecology & Art.” Concepts of permeable boundaries between objective and subjective became a perceptual noticing that influenced the painting. Since that time, I continue to explore frameworks, conceptual and through the painting practice itself, that situate we humans, within the rest of life. The title of the series Poetic Ecologies is borrowed from biologist philosopher Andreas Weber’s The Biology of Wonder and Matter and Desire. He explores the subjectivity of all nature, human and more than human. His erotic ecology demonstrates our desire for continued expression as a subjective quality we share with the rest of life. Ecology refers to living systems such as ecosystems, but is also used as a metaphor for material and immaterial webs of relationships. This feels one and the same as making a painting, an ecosystem that dynamically integrates concepts, materials, intuitions, associations, and embodied responses.

2. How do your concerns about environmental and/or social justice shape your work and your view of the world?

There have been times when the work was overtly activist exploring issues of climate, and water, through titles and/or imagery. Tar Sands Tonglen, addressed concern over dirty oil, the series Airs, Waters, Soils (Places) the deteriorating health of the Lake Champlain Watershed. But I have also come to see improvisation itself, regardless of thematically referential imagery, as revealing how life works; differentiated moments, full of relationships that can develop levels of complexity, enabling surprising, adaptive, and emergent outcomes. Filmmaker, Nora Bateson, daughter of Anthropologist Gregory Bateson writes, “In nature & in art – what you have are multiple levels of communication and relation happening simultaneously.” In the case of the Poetic Ecologies paintings, ideas, surface, marks, and color, generate compositional improvisations on plant patterns. The patterns are created by tracing projections, observational drawing, or embossed impressions from actual plants. Improvisation reveals a deeper dive into the notion of art imitating life, where imitation could be seen as the language of separation. Instead, the paintings explore that art IS life when understood within the wider context that our capacity for symbolic thought co-evolved along with the rest of life, Earth and Universe. Art as an expression of life would be true whether there is a reference in the paintings to something we might call “Nature,” or not. Again, Nora Bateson, sees art as one of the places we develop relational thinking, or what perceptual psychologist Laura Sewell calls perceiving ecologically, noticing dynamic relationships within processes. This helps loosen the grip of mechanistic thinking with all its discrete parts. In this way you could think of the arts as an ecological practice.

4. What role do you see art playing in our ecological crisis?

The arts bring more than rational intelligence to address the ecological crisis. My paintings have been influenced by a 10-year collaboration with composer Sam Guarnaccia and his creative partner-wife Paula Guarnaccia. Sam’s Emergent Universe Oratorio “seeks to bring the integrative and transformative power of the story of the Universe’s origin, evolution, and the emergence of life, to the present planetary environmental and civilizational crisis.” I created 12 large-scale paintings as the stage set behind the choir and orchestra for performances in Vermont, Cleveland, and Philadelphia. The intent of the EUO Project is to generate dialog. Again, from our materials: “The arts are particularly fitting to address civilizational reinvention. Music, imagery, and story can reach deeply into our emotion, psyche, and imagination. Employing multiple ways of knowing opens us to critical insights and motivations as we radically reorientate ourselves to life.” During the pandemic we rewrote the 10 recitatives to reflect these threshold times more closely, with an additional partner, John Cimino, President & CEO of Creative Leaps international. I am currently working with animator William Tipper using details from the paintings for a video animated stage set for a forthcoming performance, with Albany ProMusica, July 18, 2025, in Zankel Hall, at Skidmore College, in Saratoga, NY. The EUO Project, with music, paintings, animation, and educational programming aims to generate these new insights and motivations; conscious, unconscious, verbal, written, felt, and engaged.

5. Is there a call to action about the environment that you want your readers to take away from your work?

I don’t claim to have a command of Andreas Weber’s work yet. But I think there is something profound in what he offers. I do have years of intuitive exploration in the paintings, in the woods and on mountain tops. So, when I read his work, I am full of recognition of my experience of being fully immersed within a shared aliveness and expressed subjectivity that’s full of presence and kinship with the rest of life. From that sense of recognition, I want to offer you some contributing thoughts about the “call” of our time, as there are multiple ways forward in a complex system. I want to say that there is a place for your feelings. There is a place for your subjective experience of love. There is a place for your sense of awe for this life. These experiences are not some add on feature of existence. They are core.

A favorite line in the Oratorio quotes theoretical biologist and complex systems researcher Stuart Kauffman, “We live our lives forward into mystery.” Despite our not knowing what lies ahead, it seems to me that perceiving our shared subjectivity with the living biosphere opens us to sensing possibilities for innovative co-existence with a living Earth. For me, the painting practice is my small act of visually navigating this perceptual territory. There are infinite ways to practice our shared aliveness. This can’t help but support bringing our behaviors into alignment with each other and the biosphere --- enabling future’s mystery to more likely support love and life.

Weber, Andreas, The Biology of Wonder, Aliveness, Feeling and the Metamorphosis of Science
https://biologyofwonder.org/

Weber, Andreas, Matter & Desire, An Erotic Ecology
https://www.chelseagreen.com/product/matter-and-desire/

Bateson, Nora
https://batesoninstitute.org/nora-bateson/

Sewell, Laura, The Skill of Ecological Perception

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/306240203_Cultivating_Ecological_Perception_Creativity_within_Undergraduate_Explorations_of_Human_Ecology_and_Ecological_Agriculture

Kauffman, Stuart, Reinventing the Sacred
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/2029664.Reinventing_the_Sacred

Cameron Davis

www.camerondavisstudio.com

Sam Guarnaccia
https://samguarnaccia.com/

Albany ProMusica
https://www.albanypromusica.org/

Georgia Ezell

Editorial Designer

Paperbark Literary Magazine

paperbarkmag.org.

gezell@umass.edu

Deep Listening: catalog essay for painter, Sally Linder's exhibition "Pilgrimage"

Every morning I wake torn between the desire to save the world and the inclination to savor it. This makes it difficult to plan the day. --- EB White

It is not planning the days that are difficult for Sally Linder. Each one finds this prolific painter in her studio. Rather the challenge in Linder’s practice comes with the act of listening deeply to that aching tension between the “desire to save the world and the inclination to savor it.”

The context of this mid-career retrospective reveals her love of earth and what it means to be a human inhabitant and celebrated collaborator with Gaia herself. Linder’s work runs the gamut of environmental activism to intimate personal exploratory painted abstractions. While it might be easier to understand her narrative work within the larger story of these critical times, it is perhaps less obvious to comprehend the abstractions as also reflecting the same empathic relationship with Earth. It is here that I would like to offer a perspective.

Skipping Stones

The first time I viewed the paintings from the Skipping Stone series I was struck by the clarity of deep listening these mostly diminutive paintings reveal. They possess a kind of gentle humility, maybe due to their scale, maybe due to the series casual title conjuring memories of less encumbered days. There is more a sense of allowing than pushing for an agenda, more listening than telling. They seem to exemplify the paradox of the profound-simplicity embodied in the act of a moment fully noticed. In this case, that act is a visually responsive one; making marks, configuring shapes, carving surface texture, and alluding to familiar forms. Wakeful noticing lays bare the bones of one’s soul. Linder’s paintings celebrate, grieve, and delight, more like an attentive than distracted lover, the lover in this case being Earth herself. At times that palpable edge between despair and joy co-exists in the work. All of this, of course, exists within the visual language of abstraction.

It is here that I might part ways from EB White’s implication that “savoring” doesn’t save the world. Perhaps “savoring” can contribute to the “saving.” Author David Abram, in the Spell of the Sensuous, joins a growing body of literature that speaks to the necessity of maintaining our sensual engagement as critical to cultivating Earth sustaining responses.

Direct sensuous reality, in all of its more-than-human mystery, remains the sole solid touchstone for an experiential world now inundated with electronically-generated vistas and engineered pleasures; only in regular contact with the tangible ground and sky [and can we say here pigment? (Davis)] can we learn how to orient and to navigate in the multiple dimensions that now claim us. (Abram)

How else can we even notice Earth’s compromise, which in turn is our own interdependent compromise? In this way we might understand Linder’s highly sensate paintings to be a form of ecological practice, both in terms of content and material (world) engagement.

“Metamorphosis”

The abstractions of 2009, “Metamorphosis” series, are orchestral in their complexity. The interplay between the inner intuited realms and the outer phenomenal references of flora and fauna, fully rendered, fragmented, and sometimes lost all together, seem to co-arise over time. It is as if they had to wrestle and roil before coming to resolution in these emotionally charged canvases. It is here where Linder’s use of the word “pilgrimage” in her exhibition title could also be applied to her process. The making of the paintings reveal a sustained journey and a spiritual one. A look back to abstract pioneer Wassily Kandinsky reveals a kindred spirit. Linder echoes Kandinsky in her desire to connect beyond the physical, to a palpably felt metaphysical realm (Ringbom). These paintings however, are not anachronistic, nor ungrounded. I would like to suggest that by necessity we (Humanity) are collectively developing shared concerns. Global climate change alone alters our relationship with nature. We can no longer look at the beauty of a landscape without the knowledge of Earth’s precarious balance hovering closely in our perceptual periphery. Whole systems thinking is infiltrating, appropriately, how we see and understand everything. Critic Elizabeth Thompson refers to a Whole Systems Aesthetic permeating the work of a growing segment of artists. And though Thompson is talking specifically about artists whose work restores or remediates damaged waters and habitats, I would argue that on the level of perception we are beginning to digest images from a whole systems aesthetic as well. The same alteration of our perception of the landscape is true for the references to the natural world in an image whether we are aware of our anxiety or not.

When I saw the Skipping Stones paintings at the West Branch Gallery in Stowe, Vermont, I was reminded of my own despair-delight-edge with this Earth-time, and my own neglected longings. The paintings somehow gave me permission to rest, if only briefly, in the delight of savoring the sensuous now.

Cameron Davis, January 2010

The Spell of the Sensuous, Perception and Language in a More-Than-Human-World, David Abram

The Spiritual in Art: Abstract Painting 1890-1985, exhibition organized by Maurice Tuchman, Assistance Judy Freeman, “Transcending the Visible: The Generation of Abstract Pioneers,” Sixten Ringbom

Ecoventions, Current Art to Transform Ecologies, curated by Sue Spaid, essay “The Art of Whole Systems,” Elizabeth Thompson