Jane Goodall, Native Plants, and Bonobos

Jane Goodall died on October first. She was 91, and still traveling over 300 days a year giving talks on ecology, conservation, and global warming. Before her death, she taped a film/video for Netflix, with the intent that it be aired posthumously. You can view an excerpt here, or watch the whole clip on Netflix.

I also decided to include a brief excerpt of a quote to convey something of the nature of her message:

“In the place where I am now, I look back over my life. I look back at the world I’ve left behind. What message do I want to leave? I want to make sure that you all understand that each and every one of you has a role to play. You may not know it, you may not find it, but your life matters, and you are here for a reason. And I just hope that reason will become apparent as you live through your life. I want you to know that, whether or not you find that role that you’re supposed to play, your life does matter, and that every single day you live, you make a difference in the world. And you get to choose the difference that you make.

“I want you to understand that we are part of the natural world. And even today, when the planet is dark, there still is hope. Don’t lose hope. If you lose hope, you become apathetic and do nothing. And if you want to save what is still beautiful in this world — if you want to save the planet for the future generations, your grandchildren, their grandchildren — then think about the actions you take each day. Because, multiplied a million, a billion times, even small actions will make for great change.”

I thought of Jane Goodall’s inspiring message the other day as I did something as simple and mundane as walking from our driveway to the front door of our house.  Starting with our own yard, and very much in the spirit of Jane Goodall’s message, several years ago my wife Nicole began shifting her gardening focus to native plants; the path I walk now curves between three thriving flower beds that are, literally, humming with life. It is nothing short of astonishing to see the difference: Hundreds of pollinators of all kinds are busy all day, every day. Some bees are so busy they take a nap on top of a flower, something I had no idea any insect did.

I was slow to grasp the significance and impact such a shift in gardening can create. I recently saw an area of a yard Nicole has been working on for a good friend of ours. While these new beds had been planted very recently, they were already alive with pollinators. I was floored by nature’s resilience. The message, loud and clear, was that if humans get out of the way and work to give natural systems a chance, they can thrive.

A bee asleep on a flower in my front yard

Nicole has said that every time she plants a native plant—whether in our yard or in a client’s—it feels like an act of resistance against our government’s attempts to undo any and all progress we have made re global warming. This sensibility seems to be in the air; a gardening-focused influencer recently commented, when discussing native plants, that everything is political these days. I see and hear similar sentiments almost every day.

Watching Nicole’s native plant work has changed the way I see a lot of things, especially how interconnected everything is. And I have to agree—everything is political these days. And all of this informs my work in the studio.

After hurricane Helene had devastated her Asheville community, the writer Barbara Kingsolver said: “…maybe the human project is to weather the storms but still show up for the wonder.”

I couldn’t help but see parallels between the way Jane Goodall framed how we might think about the fraught time we are all in and how to encourage positive action and hope on our part, and the topics I’ve been trying to address in the studio. My painting “Hush” was well underway when I heard Barbara Kingsolver’s remarkable quote, and her words really resonated with me. Some part of “Hush” was exactly about what she so beautifully and succinctly articulated. Looking back on my thinking during the planning stages of the painting, her words accurately described the sweeping, large-scale sense of the human condition that I had worked to express.

Hush, acrylic and oil on linen, 45" x 55", 2025

In “Hush,” I then worked to create a state of tension between wonder and uncertainty as well as between harmony and chaos. The sky is as much about the failure of reason and assaults on democracy as it is about the natural world and anxiety about climate change. At  the other end of the spectrum, in spite of this tension- or perhaps as a counterpoint to it- I wanted the composition to emanate a sense that there is always the possibility of hope- however tenuous.

And there is another reason Jane Goodall’s death seemed so timely for me right now. Years ago, I read her account of quietly spending time with the alpha male of a troupe of chimpanzees at the end of the day as it sat down to watch a sunset while the rest of his troupe continued on the path. She described sharing this suspended moment in time with the chimpanzee, until- as with our own experience looking at a sunset- the spell seemed to end and the alpha male stood up and continued on his way along the path to join the group.

I mention this experience Jane Goodall described because on some level it informed my response to the bonobos I documented at the Memphis Zoo a few years ago. When one particular bonobo sat down with his knees pulled up, arms on his knees and hands clasped- and then turned his head away from us, a part of me remembered Jane Goodall’s story about the chimp watching the sunset, simultaneously reminding me of our shared genetic legacy while at the same time so completely unknowable.

Bonobos already look very similar to humans, and by making slight changes in proportion I was able to insert just enough ambiguity that the image felt more like an archetype of an earlier proto- human than a specific species of primate. This helped me point the painting in the direction I wanted it to go- the painting is about us- humans- in this particular very anxious time.

I am currently finishing a painting on gessoed Rives BFK rag paper, and it seems to be helping me figure out how to steer the next larger work on canvas somewhere between the quiet, timeless sense of harmony of “Grace” and the precarious uncertainty of “Hush”. So far, so good-  accidents and luck always play a role in coming up with a promising idea. Fingers crossed!

Wishing everyone all the best in these crazy times.

New Painting + Other Updates

Every day the news is full of things that I thought could never happen. The effects of these alarming events have been so widespread that everyone we know has either been directly impacted or they have family or friends who have. It’s come to the point that sometimes when I am in my car I almost expect to see the other drivers around me have a simultaneous, collective nervous breakdown. It would be justified. I can’t help but wonder how long any semblance of normal can hold.

All of our friends and family are doing what they can to obstruct the monsters in power, donate to worthwhile causes and get by as best they can until the midterms. Sometimes the hardest part for me is the feeling of helplessness and dread as we watch all the progress on renewable energy and climate science being undone.

Everything I do in the studio these days is in response to these events. I just finished my most recent painting, “Hush,” acrylics and oils on linen canvas, 45” x 55”, 2025 (image below). It’s the second full-scale painting in my new series, “Grace.”  I am now working on several paintings on paper and hope to finish some of them soon.

Hush, acrylics and oils on linen canvas, 45” x 55”, 2025

To maintain my sanity, I’ve been making sure I regularly read the news on certain websites and newsletters and, on occasion, specific books that help me carry on. Below are three that I have found to be both helpful and really informative.

1. On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons From the Twentieth Century by Timothy Snyder. Succinct and really helpful right now. Check it out from the library, or order from Bookshop.org to support local bookstores instead of Jeff Bezos.

2.     Paul Krugman’s Substack: He is one of the clearest and most insightful thinkers anywhere about economics and pretty much anything else he decides to write about. Read it here.

3.     Bill McKibben’s newsletter, “The Crucial Years”: I think of him as the Paul Krugman of environmental writing. His newsletter is an excellent site for carefully reasoned and articulated ideas about public policy, environmental issues, and other related info. Access it here.

Best to all as we carry on -

Alan

Stephanie Dowda DeMer's “Small Suns” Exhibition at Whitespace Gallery

The last election raised so many questions about global warming and the future of the planet that everyone I know has been overwhelmed with worry. Each of us has had to think long and hard about survival strategies, and one common denominator has been reflecting on what really matters in life, and how to stay focused on those things while still being engaged with day-to-day problems of chaos and uncertainty.

Artists addressing climate change and environmental issues didn’t start with the election, of course. But after the election…wow. I know I really felt that I had to find new ways to work—imagery, metaphors, visual language—that could rise to the occasion. For me, this has involved addressing issues indirectly, from an oblique angle, where everything in each painting is informed by events going on outside the painting. This  new work uses the general—bonobos as stand-ins for our better selves, a sense of harmony with nature, a sort of “time-out”  from worry—to allude to the specific: global warming, mass extinctions, societal collapse, and so on. It's a long list.

Small Sun 1, 2024, dye sublimation print on aluminum, 40" x 40", Stephanie Dowda DeMer

Small Sun 3, 2024, dye sublimation print on aluminum, 20" x 20", Stephanie Dowda DeMer

All of this is background to my state of mind when I went to Whitespace Gallery in Atlanta to see Stephanie Dowda DeMer’s recent show, “Small Suns,” and hear her artist’s talk. Right from the start I realized something fascinating: Here was an artist who was addressing environmental issues in her work by using the opposite approach I had been using, but nevertheless addressing the same larger concerns and themes. Her photography and mixed media work “Small Sun 1” and “Small Sun 3” used the specific (restored prairie in Iowa and restored meadow in Georgia) to allude to the general (the importance of all threatened grassland ecosystems). At the same time, Dowda DeMer  layered her imagery and combined mediums in ways that made the works intriguingly dense and beautiful in their own right. It’s a great moment when looking at someone’s work, to realize how thoughtful and smart it is. This was when I decided I wanted to write about the show to reflect on the many similarities, differences, and common reference points between her work and my own.

Closer, 2024, dye sublimation print on aluminum, 50" x 40", Stephanie Dowda DeMer

Small Sun 8, Shimmer, 2024, dye sublimation print on aluminum, 40" x 40", Stephanie Dowda DeMer

Next, Dowda DeMer’s artist’s  talk focused on a large-format, black and white work titled “Closer”; it struck me immediately as so F***ING BEAUTIFUL. I am rarely so powerfully affected seeing a work of art for the first time. The combination of realism and abstraction carried a weight that prompted me to see the tree almost as though I had never seen one before. I also realized the artist’s manipulation and  treatment of the tree image managed to somehow  sidestep any references to the history of nature photography. Quite an achievement.

Interestingly, a fourth work in the show, “Small Sun 8, Shimmer,” had the opposite initial effect on me; it appeared to be a traditional photograph of sunlight on water, taken from an aerial perspective. I have to admit that this first impression was totally wrong. As with all of Dowda DeMer’s work in this show, there was so much more going on. I was startled to notice that ”Shimmer” had a vibrating energy that was otherworldly, in the way Aldous Huxley talked about his experiments with mescaline in his book, The Doors of Perception. With “Shimmer,” it was as though the artist had captured a glimpse of this kind of heightened perception, the kind of experience someone on mescaline might want to hold onto. But by definition, this moment is fleeting, and all we can take with us is the memory of  a transcendent insight where a layer of reality seemed to have been peeled back to reveal another—possibly deeper—reality.

“Shimmer” prompted me to think about another reference point as well: James Turrell’s Roden Crater. This wasn’t a literal comparison, though. It was the idea of artists exploring expressions of ephemerality  and the sublime, and there was an important distinction between her work and Turrell’s- Dowda DeMer’s was firmly grounded in the world, which was actually integral to all of her work, and for a very similar message. I realized that Dowda DeMer was encouraging her viewers to slow down and reflect, and really look at the natural world as she was representing it in her art. In a way,  it seemed  to me that she was encouraging a kind of art-based state of mindfulness in which a viewer could share a  moment suspended in time and  hold onto it—however briefly—and in so doing to grasp what we have and really see it, which, hopefully, might lead us to be more aware of  all that we have to lose.

Death Painting

A number of years ago I was fortunate to be invited to one of the salons at the home of Louise Bourgeois. It was held in her Chelsea row house in a narrow room off the kitchen. Seated at a small table, facing everyone in the room, she engaged in a dialogue with each artist one at a time. I had heard stories about how Louise Bourgeois was brutally honest in her critiques and feedback, but for the most part what I saw was her keen mind and artist’s eye – and her curiosity.

I had asked her guidelines for what to bring, and she said, with matter-of-fact simplicity, “The bigger the better.” I had obliged, and when it was my turn the large painting I had brought had to be moved in from the hallway and balanced precariously on a stool in front of her so she could see it properly. She began by asking questions that focused on the specific, and then built towards the general (and in this case “general” meant the meaning of the painting). Her eyes were like those of a hawk, piercingly observant, missing nothing as she asked about minute details and connected them to the broader whole, prompting me to articulate how I had found what the painting was actually about in the process of creating it. L.B. grew more animated as this process went on, culminating with her exclamation, “…we know through doing!”

Looking back, when my father passed away on Valentine’s day a few years later, L.B.’s succinct statement regarding artistic process (knowing through doing) was more applicable for me than ever; I wanted to make a painting about my father’s death but didn’t have a clear idea at all what such a painting would look like. In fact, I had no idea how to even start such a painting – dealing with the many layers of grievance, the memories of my father and my own life, the mysteries and ineffability of death, was an overwhelming prospect. But the impulse – the need – to make that painting remained.

After some time, I thought of Egon Schiele’s deathbed drawing of Gustav Klimt, his teacher and fellow artist. My father had been an artist, and I realized I could address his death indirectly via Schiele’s image of the deceased Klimt. Next, I posed Emmie, our South African mastiff, backlit at the top of our basement stairs, Janus-like, bright daylight behind her and the dark basement stairs in front. She was as liminal – as “between” – in reality-based space as one can get; this opened up the metaphor I needed to paint about my father’s own liminal state as he shifted from living to dying. The addition of a cast of one of the dead of Pompeii at the top of the door helped insert a timeless sense of pathos I felt when I saw some of them in Italy; the experience was as unknowable as being in the presence of my dead father. Last, I included several graffiti images from Krog Street bridge; adolescent and raw, they added some of the universal immediacy of the human urge to make marks on a surface, something that has been at the heart of art-making since Lascaux and Chauvet.

Paradoxically, in order to achieve the goal of this entire process – which I learned through the actual making of the painting (Bourgeois’ reference to knowing through doing) – I had to undertake a painting that was not literally about my father’s death. As I began the process of making preliminary drawings and color studies, it became clear that the painting needed to be about loss in general, about one of life's guarantees that we tend to not think about: that we all will lose loved ones, and there is no easy way to make sense of it. So, I decided to use an approach that was more vibrant in palette and execution than my preliminary studies; in its final form, the painting had to be as much about the vitality of life as it was about loss, and the bright colors and active brushwork provided the counterpoint I needed to accomplish this: meaning derived from the juxtaposition of opposites.

Grace

When I came out of a major knee operation a couple of years ago, I was on fire about painting. I have no idea why. “On fire” is the closest I can come to describing my state of mind, which was a high-intensity, deep-seated excitement about painting – painting with a capital “P.” This moment signaled a pivotal time for me. I just had no idea what I would be pivoting to.

Finding this out was the hard part, and required patience with uncertainty (something I have never been good at). It also required an openness to ways of generating ideas and the role random chance can play, which is also not a strength of mine. One of the best ways I have always found to do these things is travel. I don’t claim to be original here – it’s just something I seem to forget about on a regular basis. A great reminder that I needed to get out of my day-to-day routine more often was a weekend trip to Memphis for a wedding; while there, we learned that the Memphis zoo has bonobos – the fascinating and rare species of chimpanzee that is even more uncannily similar to humans than the other great apes. Often referred to by primatologists as having a social structure that reflects the best of human nature, I had been hoping to see some in person for years. Several hundred reference photos later, I was so grateful for that day.

Fortunately for me, Nicole took a cue from our Memphis trip and suggested we travel up the east coast, visiting friends and going to sites that seemed to offer promising subject matter for new work. Our trip was planned around several priorities; high on this list was to find and document “witness trees.” The ones I was particularly interested in were from the civil war, and had been alive at the time of the battles of Bull Run and Antietem. Also high on my list were witness trees in Washington D.C. which happened to be American elms, a species of tree I grew up with in Chicago, decimated by Dutch elm disease, a tree “pandemic” that almost eradicated what I believe is one of the most beautiful species of trees in the world.

Throughout this trip I never knew what imagery might serve as the spark that would prove to be pivotal to a new series of paintings: Duke Gardens in Durham, North Carolina; the New York Botanical Garden; the art at Storm King and Dia/Beacon in upstate New York, all got in the mix in unexpected ways. Storm King’s re-wilded meadows, in particular, stayed with me and energized my sense of optimism, as did moments of extreme kindness I witnessed between strangers during our travels.

Taken as a whole, these experiences were remarkably life affirming and stood out in stark contrast to the grim politics and environmental news we read and hear about every day. Witness trees, bonobos, beauty, elm trees, memory, kindness, optimism, lush, dramatic tropical plants - in ways both large and small, all of this became “Grace”.