10.16.08 kulturnatib

Art and autumn
I am not a landscape artist. Or, more precisely, I am not a landscape painter. I do not paint landscapes. I have, however, tried my hand at it. In art school you have to. At least in the art school that I attended. I wouldn't say I was any good. Just good enough to squeeze through with a passing grade.

Over a year later, though, after passing over arts school, I tried landscape painting again. Just that one time. For no other reason than the landscape seemed to be begging to be painted. Or, as some of my landscape artist friends would probably have it, it was challenging my talents, like a young, sassy girl who would goad the hormonal control of a young boy.

The latter is actually more like it. I was the young boy with more hormones than I knew what to do with and, worse, nothing to do it with.

A dorm mate in school had invited me over to their place for a weekend. Their house was on a hill that had one of the most glorious views of the Smoky Mountains of Tennessee, USA, which, in autumn was even more glorious.

The mountain was on fire; Golden yellow, luscious orange, blazing red, royal purples, deep browns. Such, and all the hues in between, are the colors of autumn.

But I had none of those colors, or any other color, for that matter. I had exchanged musical chromatics for visual hues. Yet, the moment called for a visual palette.

My dorm mate's sister came to the rescue. Her make-up kit did, to be exact.

I don't remember exactly how that attempt -- probably the first landscape painting with a make-up kit in the history of art -- turned out. It would be safe to say that it would have confirmed the grade I earned in landscape painting class.

Also, it would have reinforced what I learned in all those odd years in art school though this wasn't taught consciously or was even explicitly part of the curriculum: art as a work of humans is different from nature however one tries to approach, mimic or copy nature using whatever medium.

This distinction or divide between art or culture and nature is, thankfully -- others would say frustratingly, -- not so clean and clear cut. Discussion, disagreement and debate on their respective boundaries and territories continue. They keep art schools in business. Artists, too.

Here, in the northern hemisphere, it is autumn once again. It is the same but different. The leaves are still in their falling fiery fineness. But they no longer tempt me. No longer, at least, to paint them. I am beyond that. I no longer see the point in that, though, for others, some artist friends who will no doubt call this season a landscape painting heaven, it will continue to have its allure for capturing in art particularly in the genre called realism or naturalism.

I am content now just to walk through a forest canopy of this kaleidoscope of color that, for all its liveliness is really a farewell to one season and the welcoming of another.

Strapped on my back is another life, 6 kilos and gaining fast, really a season coming into her own as I give way mine, hopefully, along the way providing her with enough experiences in the appreciation of both culture and nature for her to learn to paint her life as she needs to, however she wants to.