Longitude
Mike Glier
Descriptive Summary:
Between July, 2007 and July, 2008 I propose to make plein air paintings in four, roughly equidistant locations between the arctic circle and the equator on either side of the 70th line of longitude. Since comparison of the individual paintings is critical to seeing changes of light and color over time and space, the completed works will be shown in series.
Statement and Timetable:
Landscape has become an urgent subject. The scale of human activity is so grand that it is rapidly changing the living membrane that covers the stony globe. However, nature, itself, is not in danger from human industry. It is indifferent to change and will proceed apace, albeit in some grossly altered form. Humankind will not fare so well in a rapidly changing environment. So how can we protect and sustain the environment so that it continues to support civilization as we know it?
I am overwhelmed by the complexity of inventing and implementing a plan for global environmental sustainability and my fear could turn me into a fatalist. However, the activist mantra, “think globally, act locally” as clichéd as it is, makes sense to me, since it suggests that the collective effect of many small efforts can effect large scale change.
My way of addressing the current threat is to picture the vitality of the living world, to engender sensitivity toward it and to share my experience of being within it. For many years, the natural world, particularly plants, have been a major theme in my work. For example, as a visiting artist at the Wave Hill Botanical Garden in the New York, I used life studies from the gardens to create a mural cycle about the power of natural forces and their indifference to human well being. More recently, I was commissioned by the City of Cambridge MA to make a permanent mural cycle in the City Hall Annex to promote “Greenness” as a priority for the community.
In the last year I have begun a new project called Longitude, which combines observation and abstraction to depict the color, light, and motif in five distinct ecologies along a line of longitude that stretches from the arctic, through my home in upstate New York, to the equator.
The first segment of Longitude is well under way and the results are included in the portfolio that accompanies this application. Since January of 2006, I have been painting out of doors in Hoosick, New York (Latitude 42º 52 N, Longitude 73º 20 W), with oil on 24” x 30”, aluminum panels. Starting the project in the temperate and familiar landscape of home has been a good idea, since plein air painting requires that I learn new skills, such as estimating the velocity at which the wind will undo the balance of easel, painting and artist. Now that I have comfortably settled into the process, I am prepared to take the project on the road.
Between July, 2007 and July, 2008 I propose to make paintings in four, roughly equidistant locations that fall on either side of the 70th line of longitude. Since I am a draftsman, I like the idea of making a journey that inscribes a very long line. I wish that the line could be straighter, but logistics demand that I choose sites with the adequate infrastructure and the political stability to support the project. More important than drawing a long line, however, is the idea of visualizing the earth as a shared space, sectioned by scientific measure rather than by political boundaries. Also, like many Americans of European decent, the direction of my intellectual interests have been largely latitudinal. To enlarge my global awareness, I wish to increase my knowledge of the North and the South. My proposed line of travel begins just south of the arctic circle in the environs of Iqaluit, Baffin Island, Canada (63°45N, 68°31W). I plan to visit this treeless, polar desert in July and August of 2007, when the weather is accommodating and then return for a few weeks in April of 2008 to paint the spring thaw. After Baffin Island, I will go to the rainforest of Ecuador in the fall of 2007 to take advantage of the dry season. Here I will stay at Jatun Sacha, (0°59S, 77°49W), a 2500 hectare ecological preserve on the Napo River. Administered as a research station by the Jatun Sacha Foundation, the forest is one of the world’s most diverse collections of plant, animal and insect species. Early in the new year of 2008, I will travel to the subtropical environment of St. John (18°20N, 64°50W) in the U.S. Virgin Islands. The ocean and the 14,000 acre Virgin Islands National Park which is designated by the United Nations as a part of the biosphere reserve network will be the subject of this segment. In the late spring of 2008, I’ll go to my last stop, New York City (40°43, N 74°00W) to paint an urban environment from the vantage of roof tops, backyards and apartment windows. My plan is to paint the architecture and infrastructure as I would a forest or a coast line, i.e. to depict the urban environment as responsive and subject to the same evolutionary forces as the rural environment.
Since comparison of the individual paintings is critical to seeing changes of light and color over time and space, the completed works will be shown in series. Although it is premature to make a final decision about presentation, the final artworks may each be comprised of five panels, one from each site. It is my intention not only to be descriptive but also to be receptive and responsive to these five places. To this end, I have developed a process that is both objective and improvisational. I begin each painting with a walk to choose a location and then I set up my easel. I observe the colors and forms in the complex field before me, but from all these possibilities, I select only a few. Although scientists do not yet fully understand the process of consciousness, I experience my process of selection as a function of my personal agenda, an agenda that was formed in part by years of art study, experience, political deliberation and genetic predispositions. After selecting elements from the visual field, I carefully mix the colors to match the scene. Then I apply the paint with brushes, knives and rags and I make marks that are based on the motifs, rhythms, scale relations, and space of the place. I spread, splatter, knife, overlay, abut, merge, promote and eliminate elements to form a coherent picture. So that the image does not settle into description, I continually turn the panel to disrupt the conventions of representational space. Like the original selection of variables, these manipulations are both conscious and unconscious responses to the moment. I experience the process of making these pictures as deep immersion in the principles of organic change, i.e. variables promoted or eliminated, sometimes deliberately and sometimes by chance, in order to satisfy the demands of a particular but ever-shifting environment, in this case a picture. One might think that I am playing god when I make a picture, consciously shaping a world to my plan. There is some truth in this observation, but the element of chance plays such a large role in the selection and manipulation of variables that evolution seems to describe my process more adequately than does my intention to make the world in my image. I value the process of making these paintings a great deal, since it is through this process that I attempt to express my closely held belief that the natural world is not separate from culture and its products.
My new pictures fall squarely into a long tradition of landscape painting in which the natural world is constructed into an image that reflects human consciousness. The seemingly unlike landscapes of Claude, Monet and Dove are similar in this way. In response to our time, I working within a tradition of artists who picture landscape as something reflexive and intimate, and as such, portray the landscape as a body to be respected, held and loved.
