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Flora & Fauna: A Celebration of Spring

How do we interpret nature? Do we look to conquer it, live with it, feel it, understand it? Four of the artists featured in Flora & Fauna have each found ways to see nature in new ways. Which, ultimately, is why nature makes such an excellent muse—it’s always present, ever changing, infinitely interesting.

Michael Scott’s landscapes come alive not with people, but with the interaction of the four elements of nature: earth, air, fire, water. Primeval mossy forests are on fire, lit with shafts of light, bisected by streams and waterfalls, or struck by lightning. Seashores roil with crashing waves or morning mists. Scott’s landscapes draw from memory, archetypes, and iconic works of the American canon, and embody the primacy of place and an isolated grandeur. His paintings aim not to capture a landscape’s particularity, as such, but to infuse it with the regenerative spirit of nature itself. He brings to the work his own sense of wonder, enabling viewers to engage with it form their own points of view. They are rewarded with a portal into America’s wild places, where the elements take center stage.

Ester Curini’s work is a call to action for the preservation of essential wildlife. Her larger-than-life portraits of animals against a stark white background have visceral impact—the eyes of her subject creatures gaze directly at the viewer, challenging our assumptions about the intelligence of each species. Curini’s subjects are individual animals that have been victims of humans: endangered, pushed out of their natural environment, neglected, or abused. Wolves, ravens, rescued farm animals—each gets the opportunity to have a voice through their compelling presence and direct gaze. Curini raises awareness for the preservation of wildlife with her lifelong compassion and commitment as expressed through her art.

Irene Hardwicke Olivieri’s fantastical, highly detailed, and deeply personal paintings present a natural world with few divisions between animals, people, and plants as the artist explores themes of mortality, love and relationships, and obsession. Primarily a painter, Olivieri also makes things out of tiny bones, bringing skeletons back to life. “An ongoing theme in my work is rewilding the heart,” she says, “to inspire deeper connections to wild animals and wild lands.”

Through his landscapes, renowned Canadian artist David T. Alexander hopes to instill feelings less of reverence than of presence. In landscapes that are close to pure abstractions, he often applies paint with a gestural hand that captures nature’s force and flow. “Abstraction allows freedom,” he says. “I try to describe not what [a landscape] looks like but how it feels.”

—Mara Christian Harris

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