By employing astounding technique, colored pencil artist Don Simon deftly visualizes a mournful and demoralized world. It’s one where man’s increasing industrialization of the biosphere has not only pushed humans and animals into ultradirect contact and competition, but where the natural landscape has begun to frustratingly morph into the mechanized metalliscape. As a New Jersey native, where some of the nation’s most gorgeous terrain borders some of its most hideous, he knows of whence he speaks.
In “Industrial Forest 1,” above, for example, from his Unnaturalism I series, deer dart between and attempt to hide amidst a thicket of silver metal pipelines. (The grove’s absolute density becomes more clear in the triptych from which this image is taken.)
By mankind literally doing to the creation what Simon does figuratively, “We are forcing other species to deal with compromised, damaged or destroyed ecosystems,” says the artist.
Yeah, well, as U. of Texas prof Robert Jensen reminds us, quoting a friend, “Nature always bats last.”
[via Paper ‘n Stitch]
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Just had a conversation about deer yesterday. It began by discussing how there seems to be a lot more deer around this year. It ended with the question, “Are there really more deer, or just as many with less places to go?” Eternal construction has chased them out into the open, and now for me they are a bigger garden pest than any rabbit. But that seems to be an after effect of mankind’s own doing. When Agent Smith compared the nature of human’s to that of a virus, you have to hand it to him, he’s got a point.
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