Connecting with Place through Landscape Drawing w/ Rebekah

While reflecting on what the different biomes of the vast places we hold dear can teach us, we will draw small landscapes with colored pencils. We will find comfort in holding space for our collective grief and fear about the current state of our biosphere, while also celebrating all that can be learned from wild, unpeopled spaces about resilience.

We are always immersed in a conversation with our landscapes. The concept of place has always been an undercurrent of my artistic inspiration. I grew up surrounded by traditionalist Amish communities and rolling farmland, and watched the Megalopolis try to get its grubby hands on some of the highest quality soil in the world with the hopes of swallowing it up and spitting out another strip mall. It instilled in me a deep appreciation for sense of place, and a desire to protect the landscapes I hold dear.

Now, ‘Home’ is the swampy Southeast. Here, the James River runs through the heart of my adopted city, providing solace from the muggy summers as we swim alongside the herons and sturgeon. Only a few miles to any side, post-industrial sprawl creeps outwards. But along those sandy, paw paw-lined banks, there is a perceived reprieve from that world. The river serves a spiritual purpose here, as bodies of water tend to do.

I enjoy playing around with mixing unpeopled landscapes with the decaying neon relics from oil’s heyday, when the middle class first had their Fords. I think a lot about the end of oil, and how that leaves the majority of our suburban landscapes inviable without rapid and creative adaptive reuse.