陈列您的艺术作品给每天无数的访客观看

My work is principally concerned with contemporary man's mutable conception of Nature. Growing up on the rural Delmarva Peninsula, I became acquainted with the local flora and fauna at a young age. Whether working at field chores, hunting, fishing, or simply playing, my outdoors experiences were akin to the Wonderland exploits of Lewis Carroll's Alice; Carroll's premise, that "things get curiouser and curiouser," guided me through many a childhood adventure. I anthropomorphized animals and cast them as key players in an epic production, of which I too was a part. For me, as for Alice, the natural world was enchanted and, although by no means idyllic, ethical in an unsentimental way.

As I matured, however, my childhood love of nature evolved into a fascination with biology and ethology, an intellectual ontogenesis like that impelled by the Enlightenment. In the 16th century, educated Europeans began to distinguish between storied meaning and fact. They gradually abandoned enchantment, myth, and magic in favor of analysis and rigorous experimentation, hallmarks of the scientific method. This preference holds today. Yet, incidentally, we've realized that the divide between the imagination and reason is unnatural. The English poet and critic, John Ruskin, alluded to this schism when he wrote of "the broken harmonies of fact and fancy, thought and feeling, and truth and faith." Indeed, although we learn an increasing number of facts about Nature, our experience of it is less complete.

For our ancestors, Nature was understood as an extension of self. Both the man and the rock he sat on were part of the same rich story, a story in which every player -- a wolf, eagle, tree, mountain, river -- had a voice. Art and dream acted as a channel between human consciousness and animal or natural phenomena. Today, many people dismiss such "primitive" spiritualism, but, as critic Donald Kuspit writes, "while it is hard to know what is special about nature in our increasingly unnatural world, and to recognize that we remain part of it however removed from it we think we are, we continue, however unconsciously, to feel the need for a passionate, unpressured relationship with [nature] as an antidote to the daily pressure of our lives."

The existential experience we channel when contemplating animal behavior or participating fully in the world is altogether distinct from the more nuanced world of advanced self-consciousness and technological civilization. We humans are part of nature; we are exceptional creatures and our extraordinary accomplishments should be celebrated, not diminished. Still, the non-human world affords us an opportunity to confront denial of our animal antecedence, to increase wonder and joy, and to extract lessons of mortality and morality. Ethology, the study of our animal brethren, is inextricably entangled with anthropology; this knot binds fundamental truths.

The current body of work is borne of these ideas and questions. The paintings are celebratory hybrids of myth, natural history, and science; the world they picture stretches between the tidy "truth" and the messy question. They depict a melting world, a Nature torn apart and dissolving. But this dissolution is also an opening of the senses, the seepage of magic and mystery into the picture again. The drawings are similarly alchemical, poetic investigations of belonging (or not belonging) to the greater whole.

A portfolio site can be found at:
http://www.christopherreiger.com/

Writing on art, ecology, philosophy and other subjects can be found at:
http://hungryhyaena.blogspot.com/

A Retching

2006
Watercolor, gouache, sumi ink and marker on Arches paper
106.7 x 106.6 centimeters

from the tangled vegetation

2006
Watercolor, gouache, sumi ink and marker on Arches paper
50.8 x 50.8 centimeters

a cruel and beautiful faraway place

2007
Watercolor, gouache, sumi ink and marker on Arches paper
81.3 x 68.6 centimeters

between meaning and material (h.H.R.)

2007
Watercolor, gouache, graphite and marker on Arches paper
81.3 x 81.3 centimeters

turned, to a transparent fire

2009
Watercolor, gouache, acrylic, sumi ink and marker on Arches paper
55.9 x 55.9 centimeters

without maps or manifest

2009
Watercolor, gouache, sumi ink and marker on Arches paper
81.3 x 68.6 centimeters

submerged in his erotic mystification

2009
Watercolor, gouache, sumi ink and marker on Arches paper
81.3 x 81.3 centimeters

the gardener's recurring dream

2009
Pencil, watercolor, gouache, sumi ink and marker on Arches paper
81.3 x 81.3 centimeters

the wildlings come to feed

2008
Watercolor, gouache, sumi ink and marker on Arches paper
68.6 x 68.6 centimeters

will-o'-the-wisp

2008
Watercolor, gouache, sumi ink and marker on Arches paper
68.6 x 55.9 centimeters