Daniel Sprick, a person of Colorado’s most achieved artists, a short while ago returned from New York Town, in which he was making ready for a new exhibition — his initially because 2016. Opening at the Gerald Peters Gallery on February 11, Sprick’s demonstrate “Interiors” will exhibit his ethereal, realist paintings of his 16th-ground apartment in close proximity to City Park, most made throughout Covid-19 lockdown, Travel & Tips.
Sprick is arguably the greatest representational painter in Colorado, or probably the Rocky Mountain location. In Sprick’s hands, interiors are concurrently just about every-day and otherworldly. The diploma of verisimilitude in his paintings techniques fine-art photography of areas saturated in luscious natural mild. Sprick’s paintings are, in a word, stunning.
“Great splendor can be identified, can be expressed,” Sprick stated. “I imagine there is a good deal far more consensus about natural beauty than a ton of people want to feel. Which is opposed to declaring that natural beauty is in the eye of the beholder.”
Beauty is Sprick’s North Star. And he finds magnificence in realism.
“Beauty is a little something that is under no circumstances mentioned in present-day artwork, not that I know of. If it is lovely, it’s for the reason that it boosts the prosperity and status of the owner, but not on the merits of the art,” he stated.
“In our time, in architecture of the early 20th century top up to now, magnificence was thought of a weakness. Magnificence was disdained in architecture, and I consider that the other arts adopted,” Sprick mentioned. “But absolutely nothing could be far more critical and very good than attractiveness. Mother nature, yet another human: At times it stops your heart to see amazing elegance. Extremely seldom, artwork does that.”
The natural beauty and verisimilitude of a Sprick portrait can choose absent one’s breath. Same with a Sprick however-lifetime or landscape.
“A portray is light-weight and darkish patches on canvas, but these combos of light-weight and dark can unlock the enjoyment facilities of the human mind, which is what we call natural beauty and can turn into transcendent,” reported Sprick.
John Madden — a person of metro Denver’s enhancement titans, a long-standing patron of the arts and co-founder of Museum of Out of doors Artwork (MOA) — commenced amassing fine artwork in the 1960s. Madden, now 92, reduce his aesthetic tooth at the Joslyn Museum in Omaha, Neb.
“I worked there 20 many years, every little thing from carpenter to tour manual,” Madden mentioned. “That’s in which I bought to know Rembrandt and Titian.”
The Madden Assortment — of which somewhere around 100 pieces have been donated to the College of Denver — consists of works by Robert Rauschenberg, Grandma Moses, Thomas Moran, Thomas Hart Benton, Wilson Hurly, Chen Chi and many other noteworthy artists. Madden also collected 8 Daniel Sprick paintings. MOA owns a different 3 Spricks, together with a person of the painter’s enormous nevertheless-everyday living is effective. MOA also made a documentary film, “Daniel Sprick: Pursuit of Fact and Magnificence,” which can be viewed at moaonline.org.
Madden explained a person of his Sprick paintings: “It’s a river at evening. Phenomenal! It is a intimate photo, really, pretty practical with an unbelievable handling of gentle,” Madden stated. “I believe Daniel Sprick is a keeper and is going to be any person who will be remembered. His artwork reflects that.”
Timothy Standring, Denver Artwork Museum curator emeritus, mirrored on Sprick’s paintings as poetic functionality art, of types.
“Because Sprick functions in the vernacular of realism, viewers search for verisimilitude, as if his paintings had been a mirror of reality — a actuality you and I may possibly come upon,” mentioned Standring. “And but, the additional we dwell on his paintings, the additional we turn into informed that they are everything but a part of our earth, and as an alternative, are poetic renditions of his very own producing. As this sort of, we come upon Sprick’s paintings as encounters whereby we have interaction deeply with the creation of his functions. By responding to his amazing performances, we practical experience the poetry of his performs.”
Sprick normally takes his perform seriously. He is nothing at all if not earnest, and portray is his vocation, his religious quest, his raison d’être.
Requested no matter whether he ever considers portray in a model a lot less demanding than his intensely representational realism, Sprick mentioned, basically, “No.”
But then, soon after a prolonged silence, he added, “Abstract portray has no skill included. When folks say, ‘My kid could do that,’ they could. It is correct. It’s no obstacle to manufacture a merchandise or splatter paint. Never think it when connoisseurs throw a cloak of obscurity and place to criteria the place none exist. It is a activity with no policies. No material. Very little there. The emperor’s dresses,” he explained.
“I have no capability for self-delusion. I’ve in no way had the slightest layout to fake, no make any difference what accolades or good results it could be rewarded with. I feel I’d fairly drink poison,” Sprick mentioned. “That’s why I have no artist statement, no concept. Here’s my artist assertion: What you see is what you get.”
Authenticity by way of verisimilitude in Sprick’s realist paintings impresses every person in his orbit. Longmont-primarily based Scott Fraser, an additional renowned painter functioning in realism and surrealism, is Sprick’s peer.
“I’ve known Dan for 40 yrs. We have each and every other’s paintings. He’s on my record of preferred artists. We’re close mates,” Fraser claimed. “It’s remarkable what he’s accomplished technically. There is a consistent top quality to his do the job that he has taken care of. He has experimented with subject issue, and I value that. He’s quite broad. I’m just a nevertheless-everyday living painter, but Dan paints continue to-lifes and landscapes, seascapes, cityscapes. He paints the figure,” Fraser claimed. “He has a specific talent established that will get greater, and he applies it to all points.”
Sprick, now working on an almost-daily life-sized nude, credits not only his expertise, but also his devotion.
“I’m continue to making an attempt to grasp it, because it can’t be mastered. My complex skill will get superior and much better, partly for the reason that I really do not do just about anything else. I try to eat, rest and ride bicycles — I trip a bicycle to get the job done most days — but I do practically very little else but artwork. Which is fully my choice to are living and breathe and development into bigger attractiveness,” reported Sprick.
His life-style evidently works for him. At 68, Sprick appears virtually boyish: slight, an unwrinkled facial area, a complete head of brown hair. Still he appreciates he’s no Peter Pan of portray.
“I’ll preserve likely as extensive as I’m equipped. I’m having more mature, and I will run out of time. The clock is ticking for me like for everybody else, so I’m working complete tilt when I however can due to the fact I know the capability will go absent.”
Meanwhile, he’s fulfilled and pursuing his inner compass: “There is even now undiscovered territory,” Sprick explained. “I’m sailing for a continent I’m not even positive exists.”
Colleen Smith is a longtime arts writer primarily based in Denver.
As part of an ongoing effort to make content more accessible,LAM will be making select stories available to readers in Spanish.
Angular and lean, the new St. Pete Pier in St. Petersburg, Florida, folds its way for 1,380 feet from land to water. Under a bright, hot sun, even 10 feet may be just a few too many, Alternative Medicine.
The pier’s many shifts, crossings, and cantilevers, made possible by more than 400 concrete pylons, make the journey seem rather effortless, however. This new addition to St. Petersburg’s urban infrastructure is more of a networked arrangement of spaces than a single object, the latter a fatal flaw that compromised the previous pier and contributed to its obsolescence and eventual demolition.
Subtle transitions allow the new pier’s architecture and landscape to take turns and communicate in a cohesive language while surfaces move up and down and laterally in plan and section. The roughly 3,000 feet from the beginning of the Pier District, which begins downtown, to the Pier Head building at the end aren’t all visible at once. Instead, the trip is divided into a series of manageable segments with plenty of respite along the way. Residents and tourists of all ages move along shared walks that begin with gateway elements consisting of an elaborate pergola, an outdoor market, and mature plantings preserved from the previous pier. Visitors quickly transition from downtown speed to park speed. Free trams share a curbless space and pass by varied programs that promote buy-local culture, public art that changes dramatically at night, sculptural play areas that integrate earthwork with native plantings, and a central civic plaza whose grand expanse and water features accommodate programming large and small.
New restaurants and pavilions allow one to pause, eat, listen to live music, people watch, get close to the water, and maybe even help sample it and learn something new about the bay at a nonprofit-run ecological discovery center. The broad palette of experiences leads to the Pier Head, where fishing is allowed and where beer is served (and in demand)—even on Mondays at 11:00 a.m.—at the rooftop bar. One may, in fact, decide to never get to the Pier Head, and the experience would not be the lesser for it given all the new options.
The integrated plan mixes plazas, buildings, canopy structures, and native trees and vegetation throughout. Photo by Rich Montalbano/RiMO Photo, LLC.
The attraction to and reliance on the edge where land meets water in Tampa Bay was reinforced by St. Petersburg’s original urban plan, which made the pier’s importance to the city both crucial and inevitable. The first platted plan of the city, drafted in 1888, shows broad 100-foot-wide rights-of-way, organized into a regular grid that covered about two-thirds the size of New York’s Central Park in an urban plan that one would have expected for a much larger city. The only interruptions to this rectangular order were a lake, a park, and a pier.
Reservoir Lake, later known as Mirror Lake, provided the city with an essential spring-fed water supply. Williams Park, initially a wily vegetated grove named after one of the city’s founders, became the urban center. The crisp geometry of a single pier, prominently shown in the 1888 plan with its cardinal axis running east–west, however, underscored its importance as an essential artery connecting city and bay. The built structure jutted 3,000 feet into the water and carried the city’s first rail cars. The eponymous Railroad Pier lasted more than 50 years until it was torn down in 1952. Six other piers followed, each with its own claim to St. Petersburg history and identity, before today’s Pier Park opened on July 6, 2020. As a prominent symbol since the city’s founding, it’s difficult to think of St. Petersburg without the pier and the pier without St. Petersburg.
The city’s subtropical surroundings at the time of its founding also played a role in its urban form. The dense ecologies of saw palmetto, slash pine, and cabbage palmettos nearby, and the irregular, water-filled pockmarks of a karst landscape only a few miles away, looked nothing like the city’s Cartesian plan. To city founders who came from as far as St. Petersburg, Russia; Detroit; and Philadelphia, the urban plan must have conveyed an aspirational stability that augured a prosperous future where its connection to the water would be essential. Both Pier District design teams incorporated some of these native ecologies and geomorphologies into their plans, not only to ensure the landscape’s longevity in a tough coastal setting, but also to celebrate it as part of the city’s regional identity.
Former parking lots are now the setting for native plantings that are resilient and representative of the region. Photo courtesy W Architecture and Landscape Architecture.
The Pier District, which is composed of the new Pier Park fronting Tampa Bay and the Pier Approach that leads to it, begins at the eastern edge of Straub Park, a leafy, 10-acre greenway that houses the city’s Museum of Fine Arts and sits on the edge of the city’s downtown waterfront. The Pier District creates a series of interconnected outdoor spaces where the public has an opportunity to speed up, slow down, and stop. The linear experience that one would expect from any other pier is instead one of ample diagonals, grade changes, and shifts in framed views that expand the experience in every direction.
All age groups, ethnicities, and athletic inclinations seem comfortable here. Despite the many activities and people that the Pier District accommodates, the presence of security staff and other public safety accoutrements that are part of almost every public space today seem to fade to the background. Couples lean against one another to catch water views, wedding tents are assembled and disassembled, grandmas keep a watchful eye on nearby tricycles, young parents seem to have enough room to let kids run around without major consequences, and they all seem to fit right in without getting in each other’s way at a destination that asks for no reservations or entrance fees. The district seems to provide for everyone and is a welcome counterpoint to the quiet and more traditional if soporific Straub Park that frames its entrance. Having had an opportunity to experience St. Petersburg before and after the new pier, its social, economic, and environmental center seems to have shifted east toward the water with this new destination.
In 2014, Ken Smith, FASLA, and Rob Rogers, the principals of New York-based Ken Smith Workshop and Rogers Partners Architects + Urban Designers, respectively, teamed up with the Tampa office of ASD | SKY to enter the competition to replace the previous pier with their winning Pier Park design. The second key part of the Pier District plan was the 20-acre Pier Approach, led by Barbara Wilks, FASLA, the principal of W Architecture and Landscape Architecture, also based in New York. Wilks, who teamed up with St. Petersburg’s Wannemacher Jensen Architects, connects the city’s edge to Smith’s and Rogers’s Pier Park to the east. The complementary projects transform the Pier District and render it unrecognizable from its former self.
Early iterations of the pier tried to balance the recreational and the functional. Though it met the practical needs of accommodating the flow of goods as part of the city’s first rail line, the pier and its waterfront quickly became a place for leisure. Postcards memorialized the pier’s bathhouses, ballrooms, recreational fishing decks, and civic events that welcomed thousands and defined the St. Pete Pier as a reliably exciting destination. The recreational amenities eventually edged out the loading docks and warehouses, even if the needs of rail cars and private vehicle access remained.
Versions of the pier have come and gone, celebrating the spirit, economic aspirations, and technologies of their time. Hundreds of incandescent lights earned the Electric Pier (1906–1913) its name. The open-air deck of the Million Dollar Pier (1926–1967) fit thousands and served as the setting for lavish celebrations. The Inverted Pyramid (1973–2013) that preceded today’s Pier Park was boldly iconoclastic, designed by the architect William Harvard to maximize unobstructed water views at the ground level, much like the Pier Park design team would be expected to do nearly 50 years later.
Ken Smith Workshop’s Tilted Lawn folds the park’s topography to create a 360-degree vantage point; its sculptural oculus casts dynamic shadows below. Photo by Rich Montalbano/RiMO Photo, LLC.
An open ground plane was an aspiration that ran its course at the Inverted Pyramid. The temptation to clutter it with kiosks, signs, vehicular access, parking, fish-cleaning stations, and retail proved too hard to resist. What was once a striking architectural object slowly became crowded by a collection of smaller things at its base. Its story is perhaps cautionary given the propensity to look at the open space around carefully designed architecture as low-hanging fruit for misguided retail retrofits. The harsh and unforgiving marine environment took its toll on the Inverted Pyramid soon after its construction, requiring ever-increasing upkeep that created ongoing structural and financial challenges despite renovations. As iconic as the Inverted Pyramid was when it was first built, it slowly became the proverbial cake left out in the rain that no amount of marketplace consulting could save. It was demolished in 2015.
The design of the two new projects—the Pier Park and the Approach—that together make the new St. Pete Pier District was the result of two different selection processes that took place at different times after a previous competition faltered. In the end, the 20-acre Pier Approach cost $20 million, and the 12-acre Pier Park cost $56 million, with a total price tag of $93 million that included ancillary projects such as new seawalls and underground utility infrastructure for the district. Together, the Pier Approach and Pier Park create an armature of spaces that is a departure from the historic linear pier’s singular axis.
The success or failure of an undertaking of that scale and civic import would predictably depend on the ability of potentially disparate landscape teams to work together. Both design teams underwent a rigorous and extended review process with heightened public scrutiny given the history of a previous pier competition, which granted a unanimous win to Michael Maltzan Architecture in 2012 but eventually rejected it in 2013 by community referendum. Given that false start, whatever came from a subsequent competition would likely be seen as a vindication or a fool’s errand.
Janet Echelman’s Bending Arc hangs gracefully above the karst-inspired landscape below it. Photo courtesy Brian Adams/Studio Echelman.
The integration of substantial public art components, the largest of which was Janet Echelman’s Bending Arc, with an impressive footprint of nearly 50,000 square feet, came after schematic plans were completed for the Pier District. The challenging chronology hardly matters now, judging from how seamlessly the sculpture is integrated by the W Architecture and Landscape Architecture team. Colorful Adirondack chairs are moved about the space below it, and circular berms rise and fall subtly from the lawn to become seating, karst-inspired land art, and unintentional bicycle ramps that probably weren’t expected to be among the mix of planned uses.
Echelman’s ephemeral net hangs delicately overhead, its changing shadows casting softly on the ground during the day and its dramatic colors shifting spectacularly at night. The sculpture was inspired by Martin Luther King Jr.’s words “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice,” and refers to the role of Spa Beach (on the Pier District’s northern edge) in the 1957 Supreme Court ruling that upheld the rights of all citizens to use the beach without discrimination. The pier’s symbolic and literal embrace of inclusivity mirrors the city’s advances elsewhere on this front given the discriminatory legacy of its waterfront parks and piers. The Million Dollar Pier and thousands of green benches that were once a part of St. Petersburg’s public landscape, for example, were unwelcome symbols of segregation to its Black citizens. Now, for the first time in the city’s history—more than 100 years—two Black women are serving on St. Petersburg’s city council, and the St. Pete Pier has become a proud symbol of inclusivity for the city.
Bending Arc references the city’s struggles with civil rights and Spa Beach’s role in a Supreme Court ruling that favored nondiscriminatory use of public space. Photo courtesy Brian Adams/Studio Echelman.
W Architecture and Landscape Architecture’s Pier Approach strives to create spaces for all, and the project carefully integrates public and vehicular access to parking areas that are accessible yet largely screened from view. The Pier Approach project includes a stormwater management strategy that overlays paths, bridges, swales, and ponds to encourage wandering and exploration, a cantilevering pedestrian deck where egrets, herons, and ducklings can now be observed, and a popular shaded playground that is nested into a berm and, judging from the decibels of a few site visits, is quite successful. New shade elements are most dramatically on view at the entrance Market Plaza and Pavilions, where a solar canopy defines the space. Existing oaks that suffered through years of soil compaction in the former parking areas are given a new life on the north side of the Pier Approach, where a ferry terminal is planned. Large circular retaining walls protect their roots while doubling as seat walls. The Pier Approach sets the stage for Pier Park to the east while keeping the consistency of the rugged material palette of concrete, metal, wood, and native plantings of both projects and the geometry of diagonals that links them.
Pier Park’s winning move to eliminate cars from the pier was a bold departure from all previous pier iterations. Highly controversial, the move nearly caused the team to be eliminated, they said, and the risky decision was berated by the public for being insensitive to visitors looking for easy access to the Pier Head. “The tram was a good response to that…it was complicated to figure out how to not have curbs [for fire trucks and emergency vehicles] and make it feel narrow and shared,” says Ken Smith. “[The city] did have a design to put a traffic circle,” adds Wilks. “Luckily it was also more expensive.” The other two finalist schemes [ALMA/Alfonso Architects, Inc., and Destination St. Pete Pier/St. Pete Design Group] both kept cars.
The central plaza’s fountain faces the Tilted Lawn and provides ample gathering areas with several access points to the pier. Photo by Rich Montalbano/RiMO Photo, LLC.
While the convenience of being able to drive to the end might seem like an obvious advantage, it would have meant negotiating and interrupting an otherwise panoramic experience of the water, free from the unpredictability of drivers. The argument for cars is hard to understand today when one sees people of all ages using the entire length on weekends and weekdays and exceeding all expectations of user counts. “We forget how much we have advanced in the last six years societally about cars and shared spaces,” says Rob Rogers. According to City Architect Raul Quintana, Pier Park is on track to far exceed the Inverted Pyramid’s visitation record, with almost 69,000 guest visits during opening week alone and despite the COVID-19 pandemic’s challenges.
The beginning of the pier where the ground starts to peel up and over Tampa Bay is anchored by a space called the Tilted Lawn, which has a dramatic oculus cutout and a grouping of large, hand-operated umbrellas. The lawn accomplishes multiple goals through its monumentality. Not only does it elevate the ground plane to create a vantage point in an otherwise flat surface that defines most piers (and Florida), but it is large enough to accommodate the oculus whose shadows animate the space underneath throughout the day and create one of the pier’s more dramatic if minimalist stopping points. As the backdrop of two fountain splash pads with angular shapes that rise from the ground to the west, the Tilted Lawn works at the urban scale of the pier’s central plaza by creating an edge that complements a broad flight of stairs leading to Spa Beach to the north, a restaurant pavilion to the west, and a vegetated area known as the Cultural Grove to the south. The water features serve as playgrounds as well as angular geometric forms that foreground the horizon and serve as a counterpoint to the billowing passing clouds. When dry, the fountains become land art, their long triangular forms tapering to the ground. The exterior faces of the fountain’s perimeter berms are pigmented to define the grade change around them, which creates a noticeable boundary that highlights their footprint and provides a visual cue for the downslope that helps people navigate its edges.
Beyond the central plaza, Ken Smith Workshop’s overwater planters called Coastal Thickets on the northern edge of the pier provide a dramatic and refreshing pause that immerses pedestrians in native ecological habitat. Consisting of four 30-foot-wide segments that stretch for almost a quarter mile, the elevated (and labeled) planting beds constructed on structure over water incorporate a zigzag path that at times extends over the edge and provides another key vantage point to view the city and understand the ecology of the region. Had they been smaller, perhaps they would be more vulnerable to the elements, but their sheer scale has so far ensured a lushness whose green is a pleasing contrast to the pier’s many concrete surfaces.
At the Pier Head, the building at the very end of the St. Pete Pier designed by Rogers, a 30-foot cantilevered roof floats over an equally large terrace as if it were an urban-scale porch that serves as lookout, event space, and dining destination. The building accommodates a breezeway and stairs in the middle of the core, which lets in a constant breeze. The structure prioritizes panoramic views to both bay and city, east and west, and slightly twists its axis to emphasize a wider view that doesn’t just look back at the pier’s main alignment but includes views of the beach to the north and a broader swath of a city that is now Florida’s fifth largest since its founding more than 130 years ago.
The Pier Head building relies on a relationship to the lawn and event space at its base to complete the experience of the pier’s terminus. Fishing now happens on a generous deck on the east side of the building—an improvement from the previous pier, where visitors had to dodge anglers and stomach fish-cleaning stations before arriving at the end. Together, the landscape of the ground plane at the Pier Head creates flexible open spaces that can accommodate a few dozen or a few thousand.
Unlike previous iterations of the pier, the complementary language of landscape and architecture contends with the threats of climate change and storm surge while providing ample space for public gathering, whether it faces city or bay. Along the north side of the pier, a breakwater reef structure made of native lime rock and oyster shells dampens the erosional effects of onshore wave action and allows the natural formation of a sand beach. In a place where hurricanes continue to shape the ecologies and landforms of the region and are capable of carving gaps in barrier islands like one did in 1848, the new St. Pete Pier sets a standard for resilience in one of its more visible and popular public spaces. A prominent emblem of 21st-century urban infrastructure, the St. Pete Pier embraces the city’s primordial connection to the water as an opportunity and looks to shape the future of the region and beyond for many years to come.
Spaces leading up to the Pier Head include a low central fountain, the Coastal Thickets overwater planters, and the Tilted Lawn. Photo by Rich Montalbano/RiMO Photo, LLC.
Ken Smith, FASLA, Ken Smith Workshop
“I love all the big moves that we did, but what really makes them work is paying attention to the grading. I did most of the grading on the site, and I did it several times because it kept changing over time. When I’ve been teaching and practicing, it’s very common for landscape architecture practitioners to say grading is a real art form, and I believe that. Engineers do functional grading, but landscape architects do grading that is actually expressive of place. At St. Pete, the landscape is flat, so we had to pick up the grade a bit because the new pier is lifted up higher than the old pier for sustainability and storm surge reasons. We had a landform that is one elevation, and we had to lift the pier up to a higher elevation, so part of the plaza and the Tilted Lawn is about how you lift that up and do it in a way that is actually interesting and really expressive of creating spaces. It’s a little bit weird, but I was thinking of the French garden and André Le Nôtre, who would lift up terrains to change your perspective and perception of space.”
Barbara Wilks, FASLA, W Architecture and Landscape Architecture
“I’m really proud that we saved almost all of the trees and they are sitting in a landscape and really look like they belong there. We built an oak pine forest that is one of the habitats of Central Florida. We had a lot of pine, which people seem to like; providing that landscape was a nice contrast to the mostly hardscape of the pier, and people seem to enjoy it.
I’m pleasantly surprised that people adopted it. The client called and said they are doing drum circles on the lawn! It’s great as a landscape architect to design a place that people respond to and enjoy. The sculpture had a lot to do with it. We got people to the water’s edge—that was a big one. Combining the two sections and creating the circulation pattern that fit Rogers’s scheme, I think we did a good job on that. It really all works as one thing.”
Project Credits
Client The City of St. Petersburg, Florida.
PIER APPROACH
Prime Consultant W Architecture and Landscape Architecture, Brooklyn, New York. Architect of Record Wannemacher Jensen Architects, St. Petersburg, Florida. Civil and Structural Engineers Kimley-Horn, St. Petersburg, Florida. Playground Consultant Earthscape, Wallenstein, Ontario, Canada. Lighting Consultant/Structural Engineer for Art Arup, New York. Electrical Engineers and Security VoltAir, Tampa, Florida.
PIER PARK
Design Architect Rogers Partners Architects + Urban Designers, Houston and New York. Executive Architect ASD | SKY, Tampa, Florida. Design Landscape Architect Ken Smith Workshop, New York. Executive Landscape Architect Booth Design Group, St. Petersburg, Florida. Lighting Design Renfro Design Group, New York. Design Structural Engineering and Marine Engineering Thornton Tomasetti, Tampa, Florida. Structural and MEPS Engineering TLC Engineering Solutions, Tampa, Florida. Civil, Marine, and Environmental Consultants Stantec, Tampa, Florida. Coastal Engineer Humiston and Moore Engineers, Naples, Florida. Geotechnical Engineer Terracon, Tampa, Florida. Fire Protection and Life Safety Code Consultant FP&C Consultants, Inc., Kansas City, Missouri. Environmental Permitting Landon Moree, Palm Harbor, Florida. Construction Manager Skanska, Tampa, Florida.
Roberto J. Rovira, ASLA, is a landscape architect and educator based in Miami, where he chairs the landscape architecture program at Florida International University and runs Studio Roberto Rovira.
Hello, this is Julian Cope. I’m speaking from the Jockey Residence in the depths of center England.
I’m just incredibly determined to chat whatever constrained facts I could tell you about Deirdre, for the reason that I believe that that it was just a really vital time in her lifetime, mainly because she was not producing strategies for the foreseeable future. It was pretty much like she was making programs for other people’s futures.
The time that I knew Deirdre was a quite enlightened time, briefly. And when I to start with came into Deirdre’s orbit – I believe it can be 1992 – we had been incredibly comprehensive-on and idealistic … and I’d say very New Age, which definitely suited Deirdre, because she was in a undesirable spot. It was as while she knew that LA was killing her. It was bodily killing her. But also, she understood that an city environment was killing her.
Pay attention to the remaining episode of “SNAP!” on KCRW (6/17/91)
So, to get started with, the gusto that she had was taken up obtaining a incredibly exciting affair with a younger male who was playing drums with me, who was about 20. And so when he arrived again, it was really distinct that she should escape to folks who have been past sympathy, who ended up into … I suppose the People use the term “empathy,” but … It was normally quite shut to the floor, the significantly-out-ness. But she allowed herself to fly when she came below. It was as nevertheless she was knee-deep in excelsis. She was there.
We had been investing so considerably time in the West Country, at the most historical stone circle in the entire world, that it just grew to become distinct that when she was heading to appear about listed here, she was just going to be drawn to it. It truly is a place in which the ancients above 5000 several years back place up stones and buried by themselves lavishly. So if they have been supplying the thumbs up and expressing, “This is a sacred landscape,” most people who’s occur given that has felt the exact same way.
Julian Cope posed by standing stones in 1992. Image by Ian Dickson/Redferns.
So she ended up keeping at our dwelling. Our residence was a incredibly peculiar place. It is really portion of an previous manor property. It’s not aged in phrases of British it can be about … it is really about 1798. But it seems incredibly archaic, due to the fact it’s all created from ships’ timbers from the Bristol Dockyard, which are all stamped, a good deal of them, are stamped on the dates. So, this seriously assisted Deirdre. She felt an ersatzness that she needed to throw off. And I believe she essential to break out of The united states in that way, in the identical way as my wife discovered, that you arrive about below, and it truly is so historical that it just allows you to divest oneself of any urbanness.
If you want to glance at her setting at this time, form in Yatesbury, England, or U.K., on Google Earth. It really is amusing, it is really so rustic, for the reason that it just places you in that brain of a complete other time. You cannot depart it. This village has had the exact title due to the fact 855. That’s 200 years just before the Normans conquered us.
She stayed below and began to get a little bit ratty with the folks that had been also staying here in our absence. So, in the stop, she reported, “I want to go and go into the jockey property,” which was this brick creating powering the dwelling, which is also historic. But it hadn’t been lived in because 1935. And I claimed, “You are not able to reside in below.” And she claimed, “I can. It is definitely great.” In terms of her trying to find solace, it could not have been improved. She’d sit at the apple tree, a great deal of the consternation of my substantially straighter neighbor. And I stated, “She’s lovely, and she’s extremely brilliant. She’s not crazy.” And she just kind of rusticked out.
Julian Cope carrying out in 1992. Picture by Ian Dickson/Redferns.
You know, she’s these a dynamic memory. We only talked in outrageous cosmic terms. We talked about quite obvious New Age things, but things that ring legitimate down the years: the roots of the woman the variety of guy that a guy ought to be in get to be in tune with the female. Was there a route to the male by the a few different ages of the feminine? Was there a route as a result of language and range? If I get in touch with my grandmother … my Welsh grandmother 9, does that suggest that there’s element of the threefold goddess of 3, 6, and 9 in there? Or 1, 3, and 9? Are these items that, as quickly as you investigate, slide to parts, or are they points that can enrich your lifestyle?
And I assume Deirdre was fascinated by the fashion in which her ancestors experienced learned to worship Christ. She was fascinated by items like the Bridget shrines in Ireland. The fact that there was this kind of issues as Bridget shrines. But she never ever acquired to the much west of Ireland. 1 of the factors that I went there was since I needed to see the union of megalithic tradition, historic stones, and switch-of-Christianity culture. And that’s what fascinated her: What produced the Irish Irish?
One particular of the things about Deirdre, I have to say, is: I experienced a lot of mates who were New Age, and they’d laugh if they were being currently being preposterous, coming out with a little something that was a little bit, y’know, a little bit soaked, perhaps. Deirdre never ever, ever felt undesirable about coming above, like, damp, ’cause she … there was very little wet about her. She was just definitely extreme, and would just go from one particular matter to a different as though it was all rock’n’roll. So when we would be conversing about Bridget shrines, we would be observing it in conditions of ritual the juxtaposition of the feminine and the male the sacred youngster and how many much more of individuals were there around the world in historical times. So she wanted to grow.
Julian Cope with his spouse Dorian in the early ‘90s. Picture by Ian Dickson/Redferns.
But I assume, with an unruly creativity like Deirdre, she was not heading to get much more than a momentary psychic poultice to position on her unruly brain. I imagine she realized that, and I feel which is 1 of the most significant points was: Her coronary heart was warmed that places like this existed. And I consider that was the detail that was quite eye-opening to her. It gave her a sense of peace. She recognized on a rock ‘n’ roll amount, which is anything that archaeologists do not get. She understood that the shaman is not the priest. The priest is a guy of the temple. The shaman is from a time in advance of that.
That is why rock ‘n’ roll is so wonderful. We’d be in the center of a conversation and she’d become: “Y’heard of The Monks?” And then we’d start talking about The Monks. Then we start off chatting about other unruly imaginations. And there was no separation in between the rock’n’roll, and the historic ritual, and trudging, and generating your journey, and wending your way, or just likely specifically. All the things was a sacred factor.
Julian Cope communing with a stone backstage at the Lunar Festival on June 7, 2015 in Tanworth-in-Arden, United Kingdom. Image by Steve Thorne/Redferns through Getty Photographs
It can be hard to read through now, in terms of … She was here to come across a little something. I don’t remember her saying, “I’ve acquired five months to find out a little something about myself in an English countryside.” She often talked to me like as although she’d fled, in the conclusion, back again from right here. I don’t know whether she was in a lousy way, or irrespective of whether she was organizing to go again in any case. But I knew her well more than enough to say that she felt like she was coming to a conclusion. I never assume Deirdre would have left if it was not for the actuality that she didn’t have potential designs. I imagine she understood that she had cooked up some fantastic shit and was gonna have to depart it on the stove for other folks to finish it.
I imagine that Deirdre absolutely invested the people today that got it with the will to do it again on a entirely various degree. It took me 8 several years to do the very first e-book on the stones. And so many of those people experiences have been hatched in this insane old position.
There are incredibly handful of people today in rock’n’roll who are intensely kindred spirits. Just one of the issues I would say most about my relationship with Deirdre was that it was attempting to facilitate her when she arrived over right here, for the reason that she facilitated me and definitely opened my eyes to what I always regarded was an MC5-ian enlightenment: a sort of “open up-minded mofos” watching each other’s backs. That’s what we have been, I consider.
And if you at any time locate time, just type in Yatesbury, England. Since it is so amusing to believe of her flitting all over down Black Lane and the Avenue and all of these destinations. Because, yeah, she was here very long plenty of to genuinely spark the spot on.
I’m maybe nevertheless pretty affected by that Yoko Ono poster that asks, “Have you witnessed the horizon recently?” Y’know, and I feel that was eventually the best, was: She observed the horizon, and it was great.
Deirdre O’Donoghue: I thank You God for most this astounding day For the leaping greenly spirits of trees And a blue genuine desire of sky And for almost everything which is normal, which is infinite, which is sure
I who have died am alive once more these days And this is the sun’s birthday This is the beginning working day of lifetime and of love and wings And of the homosexual great going on illimitably earth
How really should tasting, touching, listening to, observing, breathing any Lifted from the no of all nothing Human merely getting doubt unimaginable You?
Now the ears of my ears awake And now the eyes of my eyes are opened
— e.e. cummings
Julian Cope lives in the depths of Middle England. He introduced his most modern album of new material, “Self Civil War,” in 2020.
As before long as I stepped within the Museum of Modern day Art’s chronological retrospective “Sophie Taeuber-Arp: Dwelling Abstraction,” I felt delighted, like a kid once more. I was captivated by expressive movement, pure geometrical types and ebullient color. Taeuber-Arp (1889-1943)—one of the most creative, multifaceted and less than-sung artists of the 1st 50 percent of the 20th century—convinced me that hers is the way summary artwork was intended to be: playful, unburdened by principle, driven by sensation deceptively childlike and folksy yet rigorously composed, exquisite and complex—as disarming for its modest sophistication as for its feeling of carnivalesque joy.
‘Vertical-Horizontal Composition,’ (1916)
Photo:
Alex Delfanne
Sophie Taeuber was born in Davos, Switzerland, in 1889, and acquired textile crafts from her mother. She studied high-quality art and textile design in St. Gallen and, later on, woodworking, textile and interior style and experimental art education in Germany. In 1914, she moved to Zurich, where by she danced and choreographed, established herself as an artist and met her long term spouse, the sculptor Hans Arp (1886-1966).
Sophie Taeuber-Arp: Living Abstraction
The Museum of Present day Art by way of March 12, 2022
During her existence Taeuber-Arp figured prominently in the European avant-garde. The Arps participated in the Dada movement and she taught in the applied-arts division of Zurich’s Trade University. In the late 1920s, Taeuber-Arp finished many architectural and inside-structure projects, including the Arps’ residence in France and, most notably—with Hans Arp and de Stijl cofounder Theo van Doesburg—the Aubette enjoyment advanced in Strasbourg, France. Taeuber-Arp died of accidental carbon monoxide poisoning in 1943.
The traveling survey was arranged at MoMA by Anne Umland, with Laura Braverman at Kunstmuseum Basel, Switzerland, by Eva Reifert in London by Tate Modern’s Natalia Sidlina and by impartial curator Walburga Krupp. The initial significant U.S. Taeuber-Arp retrospective in 40 several years, it contains some 300 operates: paintings, drawings, textiles and sculptures glass-beaded jewellery, purses and abstract compositions furnishings and inside, graphic and theater designs turned-wooden containers, heads and marionettes.
MoMA’s opening galleries are pleasurable, unassuming—downright enchanting. Listed here are a handful of smaller, abstract gouaches from 1920: pointillistic grids manufactured of very small, tessellating coloured rectangles—polyphonic rhythms racing throughout the wall as twinkling, staccato attacks. We see beaded bracelets, necklaces and purses, in which jovial shapes animate their curved surfaces and snake about and all-around types like glowing barbershop poles and uneven, challenging-edged gridded compositions in colored pencil and gouache and metallic paint, or made of gleaming beads and thread, or of embroidered, nubbly wool.
“Abstraction With Summary Motifs (Notebook Cover)” (c. 1917-18), in glass and metallic beads on canvas, sparkles like a fantastical, bejeweled landscape. “Vertical-Horizontal Composition” (c. 1917), comprising many multicolored rectangles in wool on canvas, economically introduces the diagonal, reimagining and buckling the patchwork aircraft. Anchoring these colored abstractions are the painted, turned-wood “Dada Cup” (1916), “Amphora” (1917) and “Powder Box” (c. 1918), polished objects conjuring summary heads, totems and chess parts.
A person gallery is devoted to the wonderful summary Dada heads—colorfully painted and festooned, smooth, lathe-turned wooden ovals—and the magical, mixed-media marionettes (exotic individuals, animals and trees suggesting angels, robots) and stage sets Taeuber-Arp established in 1918 for the string-puppet participate in “King Stag.” In abstract tapestries, rugs and tablecloths, Taeuber-Arp fuses people artwork, neoclassical artwork and modernist abstraction. Her subtle shade flashes and breathes, as if she ended up weaving emotions, as if cloth were being flushed pores and skin. In “Cross on Red Ground (Tablecloth)” and “Tapestry” (equally 1924), white-fringe borders suggest stage curtains and architectural columns flanking summary dramas. And in stained-glass home windows developed for the Aubette and personal flats, Taeuber-Arp employs rectangles of pure most important shades and black and white together with individuals in blended hues (pinks, oranges, grays, greens, browns). These are fashionable abstract distillations of mother nature, but also reminiscent of the stains and blended tones of the dark painted particulars in medieval stained glass.
‘Off-Center Abstract Composition’ (1928)
Image:
Musees de Strasbourg
The last three galleries element Taeuber-Arp’s abstract paintings, drawings and painted wooden reliefs from the 1930s and ’40s. Constructivist and de Stijl paintings and bas-relief sculptures include delicate balancing functions amid a handful of correctly orchestrated, difficult-edged geometric aspects. In the oils “Broken Cross,” “Six Areas With 4 Little Crosses” (both of those 1932) and “Six Different Spaces” (1939), Taeuber-Arp juggles absolutely free traces and warping flat shapes, and holds the airplane taut and elastic with the precision of a tightrope walker. In painted-wood reliefs, round holes and protruding circles and cones pulse with dynamic equilibrium.
In the summary carved-wood “Head” (1937), Taeuber-Arp evokes teardrop, knight’s helmet, yawning beak, seductive human mouth, pert breast. Most lovely here, possibly, are the biomorphic nonobjective paintings and painted-wood-aid rectangles and tondos in which pared-down sorts interact—shift, dance, rise, drop, circle and merge with 1 another—as by natural means as waves, swooping birds and solar devices.
Every thing in “Living Abstraction” is beautiful—alive. The present re-establishes Taeuber-Arp at the pinnacle of early 20th-century abstraction, as it makes us painfully knowledgeable of a lifetime and oeuvre slash quick. Certainly see this excellent exhibition. But dig beneath the playful surfaces. Taeuber-Arp’s artwork appeals 1st and foremost to our senses—to our appreciate of gentle, colour, motion, rhythm. But its real reward is the enjoyment of discovery—that of unearthing the treasure that is her art’s allusive brilliance.
—Mr. Esplund, the creator of “The Art of Wanting: How to Read Contemporary and Modern Art” (Essential Textbooks), writes about artwork for the Journal.
BRAINERD, MINN. – For more than two decades I’ve worked to attract wildlife to 70 acres of land I own not far from town. Each project I’ve implemented has been successful. It’s very gratifying work.
Equally rewarding has been landscaping my yard with fruit-bearing trees and shrubs meant to attract and hold birds year-round. Now, during winter, many species of birds rely on fruit as fuel for their internal furnaces because insect and other foods are nonexistent in winter. I’ve also planted a variety of evergreen trees. Birds seek shelter from the wind and cold among their thick branches. The trees also provide nesting sites in spring and provide protection from birds of prey and other predators.
We can and do, of course, attract birds to our yards by placing a variety of well-stocked feeders. Techniques outlined below are perhaps somewhat less traditional and can be more labor intensive at the outset. But they are also longer-lasting and ultimately, I believe, more satisfying — to people as well as birds.
You don’t have to live in the country to successfully lure birds with your plantings. Nor do you need to own a lot of land. Our feathered friends will respond to your habitat improvements even if you reside in the heart of a metropolitan area. And there’s no better time than now to start planning your bird-friendly backyard improvement project. All the better to be ready when nurseries open in spring.
Of course, for plants to grow here in Minnesota they need to be cold hardy. Fruit-bearing tree species to consider are crab apple (red-splendor is my favorite), mountain ash and highbush cranberry.
In more confined areas of your yard where trees might be too large, fruit-bearing shrubs will not only attract birds, but will add beauty to any landscape project. Shrubs can be placed singularly next to homes or garages, or can be planted close together and trimmed to form hedges and boundaries.
It’s a good idea to plant a variety of trees and shrub species that will provide food for wildlife throughout the year. For example, scarlet elder produces fruit in early summer, red-osier dogwood and serviceberry in mid-summer, grey dogwood, American elderberry, arrowwood and chokecherry in late summer. Most fruit from summer bearing species will be gone by now, but why limit your landscaping efforts to just winter varieties. Highbush cranberry, mountain ash and crabapple ripen in fall and hold their colorful bird-attracting fruit through winter, or until hungry birds devour the delicacies.
When choosing plant varieties, native species always grow best and with the least amount of effort. By talking with nursery staff, and by reading books and doing internet research, you will be able to find an assortment of trees and shrubs that grow well in your location and still provide birds and other wildlife the benefits of food and cover.
If you are looking for instant gratification, the addition of a heated bird bath is a great idea. Wildlife, even during the cold season, prefer to drink water rather than eat snow for their daily fluid intake because they don’t need to burn up extra energy melting the snow. And yes, some birds bathe during winter, especially when temperatures are above freezing.
An unforeseen problem I didn’t count on is that white-tailed deer also prefer drinking liquid to eating snow. So, some mornings I must fill the bird bath because deer — under the cover of darkness — drink it dry overnight.
Gray, fox and red squirrels also find the open water to their liking, and drink every day from my bird bath. I don’t mind sharing my projects with various species of wildlife.
Your entire landscape plan need not be accomplished in one season. However, the sooner you get started, the quicker you’ll realize the rewards. When you gaze in awe at a flock of pine grosbeaks as they descend upon your crabapple tree on a cold winter day, or when cedar waxwings gather to feed on mountain ash or highbush cranberries, you’ll know your labors were well worth it.
Keep this in mind, too: A bird friendly backyard not only provides treasured food and habitat for our feathered friends, it also increases the aesthetics and value of your property.
One day when Barrett Klein was a young boy, he found a dead butterfly in the driveway of his family’s house and marveled at its beauty. It was a transformative moment. “At age five I had a nebulous epiphany in which I knew that insects would be the core of my existence,” says Klein, who is now an entomologist at the University of Wisconsin-La Crosse. He’s also an artist, and insects feature prominently in his art.
Throughout history and across many cultures, insects have inspired artists and artisans. Moth larvae, bees and beetles have provided silk, wax, dyes and other art media. Some insects leave traces on their environment that artists capture, while others in effect become collaborators as their natural behaviors are incorporated into art. “With all of their myriad forms, you’ve got exquisite behaviors as well as colors and shapes to choose from, or be mesmerized by,” says Klein, who recently reviewed the role of insects in art in the Annual Review of Entomology.
Much of this work plays on the conflicting feelings we humans tend to have toward insects — we’re simultaneously fascinated by their strange biology and unfamiliar lifestyles and repulsed or frightened by their stingers, toxins and the diseases they may (or may not) carry. Not to mention their sheer scuttling, swarming numbers.
“They don’t live like us. They don’t look like us. They do the things that we do in such bizarre and wild ways that it’s just endlessly intriguing,” says artist Catherine Chalmers. “They offer a very, very different perspective on life on Earth.”
From ancient cricket etchings to beetle shawls
One of the oldest known examples of insect art is an engraving of a cricket carved into a fragment of bison bone found in a cave in southern France and thought to be about 14,000 years old. Ancient people were great observers of the natural world, says Diane Ullman, an entomologist and cofounder of the Art/Science Fusion Program at the University of California, Davis. Insects are found everywhere humans live (they’re scarce near the poles of the Earth and absent only in the ocean’s depths), and they show up in artifacts from Mesoamerica to Mesopotamia. “Insects became part of the cultural and spiritual stories of people all over the world,” Ullman says.
Images of scarab beetles, for example, are common in the religious art of ancient Egypt, where their habit of rolling balls of dung across the ground (to provide food and shelter for their brood) symbolized the god Khepri rolling the sun across the sky each day. In the Navajo creation myth, Ullman says, cicadas lead people to emerge into the world, mirroring their own life cycle of periodic emergence from underground.
The varied use of insect parts and products in art includes (from left to right), lac bug–derived shellac decorating a piece of Tibetan horse armor, iridescent beetle elytra incorporated in an ear ornament made by the Awajún people of South America, and red pigment derived from cochineal insects in a painting by the Flemish artist Anthony van Dyck.
Metmuseum.org/Public Domain; B.A. Klein, taken with permission in the collections of the Field Museum of Natural History; A. Van Dyck/Public Domain
Insects have long provided artists with material for their work. Shellac, derived from the resinous secretions of the female lac bug, has been used for more than 3,000 years. It helps give the sheen to ornate Tibetan armor, among many other examples. Carmine, a brilliant crimson dye derived by crushing up cactus-sucking cochineal bugs and used by the Aztecs and Mayas, commanded exorbitant prices in 16th century Europe, where it was coveted by artists and textile makers. It made reds pop for Rembrandt and other Dutch master painters.
Some cultures use insects themselves, or at least parts of them. The Zulu people of southern Africa string the tiny bodies of immature scale bugs into elaborate necklaces (the insects coat themselves in protective wax that makes them look a little like pearls). Fireflies add “living jewels” to clothing in India, Sri Lanka and Mexico.
Another striking example is the singing shawls made by the Karen people of Myanmar and northern Thailand, says Jennifer Angus, who teaches textile design at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. These woven garments, so named because they’re worn at funeral ceremonies where mourners sing around the clock for several days, sometimes have a fringe made from the shiny, iridescent elytra, or hard outer wings, of jewel beetles. Angus, who grew up in Canada, had never seen anything like it. “I really had trouble believing that it was real,” she says.
The discovery inspired Angus to start incorporating insects into her own work. Her first installation was at a storefront gallery in Toronto, where she arranged hundreds of weevils into a wallpaper-like pattern on the walls. When people walked up to take a closer look, Angus says, “literally, I saw them take a step back as they realized the wallpaper was composed of insects.” The piece created tension, she says, between what people expect when they see a pattern they associate with domestic spaces and the realization that the pattern is composed of bugs, which most people don’t like to find in their homes.
This time-lapse video shows how artist Jennifer Angus transformed an entire room of the Renwick Gallery at the Smithsonian American Art Museum with patterns of carefully arranged insects and a pink wash made from the cochineal insects used in carmine dye. (Credit: Smithsonian American Art Museum)
Angus continues to exploit that tension in her work. “A lot of people don’t like insects, but they’re OK with them when they’re put in patterns, because a pattern is ordering and it’s asserting a kind of control,” she says. “When I put them into something that’s sort of like a swarm, people find that very disturbing because that’s mimicking what they actually do in the wild.”
Making art from insect creations
Experimental designer Marlène Huissoud says she’s had a similar reaction to some of the objects she creates from products made by bees and other insects. “A lot of people, when they see the pieces, they say they are very attractive … but at the same time there’s something a bit scary to them,” she says.
Huissoud grew up around bees — her father was a beekeeper in the French Alps — and her work applies methods that are commonly used with industrial materials to products made by insects. In some projects, for example, she’s used glassblowing methods to work with bee propolis, a resinous substance that bees use to build and repair their hives. (To make it, bees gather plant resin from leaf buds and bark and process it with saliva and secretions from their wax glands). Huissoud says she can harvest 50 kilograms of propolis a year from her father’s 700 hives — a small haul compared to the roughly 20,000 kilograms of honey they extract.
Huissoud devised a low-temperature kiln to work with propolis, which melts at around 100° Celsius (212° Fahrenheit), compared with 1200°C or so (about 2200°F) for glass. But from there the process is similar: building up layers of melted resin on a rotating rod and allowing it to cool slightly before blowing it. In her Of Insects and Men series, she used both bee propolis and actual glass to “disturb the eye of the audience” and challenge notions about what’s a natural material and what’s an industrial material. The bee propolis binds the shards of black glass together. “It’s only when you see them in real [life] that you actually realize it’s pure resin because it’s really smelling like in the beehive.”
Other artists work with the traces that insects leave behind. Seattle-based artist Suze Woolf first noticed evidence of bark beetles while hiking in the forests of the Cascade mountains near her home. Bark beetles are small insects that lay their eggs under the bark of trees. In the process, they excavate tiny tracks through the phloem, the vessel-laden tissue that distributes sugar and nutrients made by the leaves to other parts of a tree. These squiggles caught Woolf’s eye when she saw them on bits of bark that had fallen to the ground. “They look very much like a strange script that we just can’t read,” she says.
The resemblance to written language inspired Woolf to create a series of 36 (and counting) unconventional books that incorporate bark beetle tracks in different ways. One, called Survivorship, was inspired by the chemical warfare that takes place between mountain pine beetles and the trees they choose as hosts. The trees release aromatic compounds called terpenes to deter the beetles, but the beetles are able to convert some terpenes into a pheromone that attracts more beetles and can initiate a mass attack. The cover of Survivorship is an actual slice of log engraved with mountain pine beetle tracks; the pages contain ink reproductions of beetle tracks overlaid on the genetic code for monoterpene synthase, one of the enzymes that trees use to generate defensive chemicals.
On the pages of her work Survivorship, one in a series of bark beetle books, artist Suze Woolf printed the genetic sequence for one of the defensive chemicals used by trees to fend off bark beetle attacks, overlaid with the pattern made by the insect. The cover is made from a log engraved by mountain pine beetles.
Photo courtesy of Suze Woolf
Woolf says Survivorship was inspired in part by research by University of Montana entomologist and ecologist Diana Six, who has been searching for genetic variations and differences in trees’ chemical defenses that might explain why some trees survive beetle outbreaks and others don’t. Other books in Woolf’s series incorporate other bits of scientific data — graphs showing the spread of bark beetles through forests in British Columbia and Alberta, for example, or satellite images that show the resulting damage to trees — gleaned from conversations with scientists and from reading their research. “They teach me things I didn’t know,” Woolf says of her scientific collaborators. “I get ideas I wouldn’t otherwise get.”
Science, not art, was what initially motivated Walter Tschinkel to make casts of underground ant nests, something he’s been doing for decades. “I thought I knew what they looked like underground just from having dug them up,” says Tschinkel, a myrmecologist (an entomologist specializing in ants) and emeritus professor at Florida State University. “It turned out I hadn’t really imagined it correctly.”
As he recounts in his 2021 book, Ant Architecture: The Wonder, Beauty, and Science of Underground Nests, Tschinkel tried several materials, including latex and dental plaster, before finally settling on molten aluminum. The tricky part, naturally, is heating aluminum beyond its 660°C (1220°F) melting point in the field and pouring it into an ant nest without hurting yourself. To do this, Tschinkel developed a portable kiln fired by charcoal. He used the bottom half of a steel scuba tank as a crucible. Sometimes he uses zinc, which has a lower melting point than aluminum and stays liquid longer, penetrating further into finely structured nests. Once the metal cools, it can take hours to dig out the cast of a large nest and clean it up. (A video of Tschinkel’s process has been viewed more than 370,000 times on YouTube.)
Myrmecologist Walter Tschinkel stands next to a plaster cast he made of a Florida harvester ant nest. The 8.5-foot-long sculpture captures the intricate structure and depth of the underground nest.
Photo by Charles F. Badland/Wikimedia Commons
The molten metal captures the intricate chambers and passages of the nest, which turn out to be a lot less random and more organized than Tschinkel had realized. Tschinkel describes it as a “shish kebab” structure, with many horizontal chambers connected by long vertical tunnels. “Practically all nests have that basic structure, which tells me that the ancestral ant a hundred million years ago probably dug a simple nest … and from that basis all other nests have evolved.”
Harvester ant colonies can live for 30 or 40 years and, when possible, Tschinkel waits for a colony to move to a new nest before making a cast, to avoid killing the inhabitants. “I’m very fond of them,” he says. He estimates he’s made several hundred casts over the years, including the nests of about 40 species, most of them native to Florida. “I think they’re beautiful objects,” he says. “That’s part of the joy of doing this kind of work.”
Artist-insect collaborations
Insects may be unwitting collaborators in the work of Woolf and Tschinkel, but some artists see them as collaborators in a more literal sense. One colorful illustration of this is the French artist Hubert Duprat’s work with caddisflies, a group of insects related to butterflies and moths. Caddisfly larvae feed on decaying leaves and other detritus in rivers and streams. They encase themselves in a protective layer of silk, which they adorn and reinforce with grains of sand, pieces of twigs and other materials in their environment.
Duprat wondered what the larvae could do with more glamorous materials. So he raised some in an aquarium, giving them access only to flecks of gold, tiny pearls and bits of precious stones. The insects fashioned new, blinged-out cases for themselves. “The work is a collaborative effort between me and the caddis larvae,” Duprat says in a video segment on the project. “I create the conditions necessary for the caddis to display their talents.” Last year, Duprat published a book on his caddisfly collaboration, The Caddisfly’s Mirror.
A caddisfly larva has constructed a bejeweled case for itself, using materials supplied by artist Hubert Duprat.
Photo H. Del Olmo/Courtesy Gallery Art Concept, Paris
Insect behavior itself becomes the art in the work of Catherine Chalmers. In one long-running project, she photographed and filmed leafcutter ants in Costa Rica. These ants cut bits of leaves from high in the forest canopy and carry them back to their underground nests to provide a substrate for the fungi they cultivate as food. They use airborne chemical signals and vibrations to coordinate their activities, and their colonies can sustain millions of individuals. The eminent biologist E.O. Wilson called leafcutters “the most complex social creatures other than humans.”
In a series of works Chalmers describes on her website as intended to “blur the boundaries between culture and nature,” she carted 300 pounds of camera gear to Costa Rica each winter to create works based on the ants’ natural behavior in ways that draw parallels to our own. In one series, called War, she captured gruesome scenes from a three-week battle between two colonies in which many ants were dismembered and killed. Chalmers placed white plastic sheets around the area where the ants were fighting before filming them (the ants quickly habituated to the sheets and resumed their nightly battle). A video from the series looks like it was staged and filmed in a studio, even though Chalmers filmed it in the field. This somehow makes it more disturbing to watch than if it looked more like a nature documentary.
A cockroach in an electric chair is part of Catherine Chalmers’s Executions series, which challenges viewers to reexamine their attitudes toward these widely despised insects.
Catherine Chalmers
Chalmers doesn’t kill the insects in her work, although sometimes that’s how it looks. In a series called Executions, she placed cockroaches purchased from a biological supply company and kept in her New York City apartment in scenes of a hanging, an electrocution, a gas chamber and so on. In one, she filmed a live cockroach tied to a stake (she blew on it to make it move), then swapped in a cockroach that had died of natural causes before setting the stake on fire. The series elicited varied reactions, Chalmers says, from someone in San Francisco who ran out of the theater, to a man at her show in Boise urging her to kill as many cockroaches as possible.
“In her executions series, she really stirred emotions — you could argue in surprising ways — from people who might not think twice about spewing pesticide or squashing cockroaches,” says Klein. The series raises an interesting question, he says: Does seeing a cockroach play the part of a human condemned to die change how you feel about the cockroach? “Do you extend your circle of empathy … to a hexapod?”
Other artists have gone further, implanting computer chips in living insects or staging live fights, as in Chinese artist Huang Yong Ping’s controversial workTheater of the World. For Klein, the latter, at least, is a step too far. “I think that’s a gratuitous display of gladiator-style entertainment,” he says. “You’re purposely throwing organisms together to cause harm to each other, and I don’t see much value in that, but others might and others have. I think all of us draw our own lines.”
In his antiwar piece captioned “Withus Oragainstus,” the UK-based street artist Banksy militarized a Harlequin beetle with airplane wings, missiles and a satellite dish. The framed specimen was surreptitiously displayed for a short time by the artist in the insect collection at the American Museum of Natural History in New York City.
Many artists hope their work with insects will raise awareness of the important roles the creatures play in the environment and provide a lens through which to reexamine our own influences on the natural world.
“The longer I’ve worked with insects, the more I’ve learned about them,” says Angus. “I’ve come to an understanding of just how important insects are to, frankly, our wellbeing on this planet.” Insects pollinate plants, including many food crops, and they play integral roles in diverse ecosystems as decomposers of waste and as parts of the food chain. Some of them may be sentinel species for the impacts of climate change — the mountain pine beetles Woolf has worked with, for example, are expanding their range northward and taking a bigger toll on trees made more susceptible to attack by the stress of longer, hotter springs, summers and falls.
There is still tremendous untapped potential for artists interested in working with insects, says Klein. He examined 164 works of insect art for his recent review article and found that the majority involved just two orders of insects, Hymenoptera (which includes bees) and Lepidoptera (butterflies and moths). Even within those two orders, the two species with the most extensive history of human exploitation — honeybees and silkworms — were heavily overrepresented. “What about the other 183,000 described species of Lepidoptera?” Klein asks. In addition to new silks and dyes, there may be other materials artists could use — like chitin, the tough, lightweight material that forms much of the exoskeleton of insects. Engineers have considered chitin for building structures on Mars, he says, but the artistic possibilities have scarcely been explored.
With many millions of insect species (only about a million of which have been named) and 10 quintillion individuals, the world is literally crawling and buzzing with possibilities.
Knowable Magazine is an independent journalistic endeavor from Annual Reviews.
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