Visions of the Natural Mind

By D. Eric Bookhardt, GAMBIT WEEKLY 

How do we think, with the brain or with the mind? If a voice in your head whispers “brain,” stop and consider why we think. To make decisions, obviously —”yet most essential life decisions are not made consciously. We do not tell our blood how much oxygen to absorb through our lungs; our body does that for us. The brain decides where we go for lunch, but the body decides just how that pizza is going to be digested. Since our most vital decisions are made by nature — the body — most such calculations can therefore be seen as functions of the natural mind: that is, the autonomous sensory networks of the body, brain and beyond.

Obviously, nature is doing most of the work/making millions of cellular decisions in split nanoseconds even as we struggle with a crossword puzzle. Yet our puny ego-brain boasts of its “conquest” of nature! What a joke! Clearly it is time to revise our self-ordained role within the natural world. In this regard, Jacqueline Bishop”s paintings at Arthur Roger reflect a somewhat more encompassing view, a metaphysical reality made all the more incisive by the canvases” covert mythopoetic dialogue with the viewer.

Bishop describes herself as a “landscape painter, yet the ordinary art lexicon somehow fails to convey what this entails. As with most of her work of recent years, the new paintings grew out of her experience in the rain forests; and if earlier shows illuminated her view of the rain forest as a gauge of planetary wellness, these works, additionally, distill metaphors from scientific data. Hence they elucidate mysteries even as they illuminate facts, yielding a realm of signs and omens, a primeral rain forest of the psyche. It is the miragelike frontier of human consciousness as it confronts that terra incognita of infinite intelligence: the natural (or universal) mind at large.

Veiled hints of this appear in Rose Voice or La Innocenta, visions of prismatic humming birds and flowering bowers which at first evoke the tropic landscapes of the Romantic realists. At least until we notice their uncanny stillness, an eerie quietude as if the hummingbirds (called beija flor, or “kiss the flower” in Brazil) were somehow fated, harbingers of an avian apocalypse. Parallel sentiments appear in Recapture, in which a hummingbird is seen profiled, wings spread against a crimson sky, enmeshed in netlike tendrils. It is a graphic explication of the woven fabric of life, of the ties that can bind — or strangle — depending on the ecological-balances. In Savage Niche, a bird nest in a leafy bower assumes a darker resonance as we see the pale bones of its tiny occupant amid the latticelike remains of its once emerald domain. A vision of stark intricacy and lacelike formal structure, it is all very vertiginous and hallucinatory, a disorientation-only heightened by our encounter with the Inga Tree.

A mytho totemic World Tree in microcosm, it is, like any tree, a sanctuary for the birds inhabiting its gnarled, embracing structure. Yet, a crimson sky glowing eerily beyond these barren limbs serves as an apocalyptic reminder of the global holocaust that daily consumes rain forests as they are slashed and burned for commercial “development.” It is an ecocide that is met, like genocide, with a sustained silence of vast global proportions. Even so, it is the tree”s trunk which finally holds our eye, for it is a body made of bodies — of flowers and fish, animal skulls and bones, crowned with breasts, multiple mammaries like those of the Ephesian Artemis (sometimes called Diana). And if this sounds far fetched, consider that for the Warao tribe of Venezuela, the cachicamo tree, a “Mother of the Forest.” must be consulted if her daughter is to be taken for tribal use as a canoe. Be that as it may, Bishop”s Inga Tree is a modem icon. a totalizing totem, a visual invocation of the interrelatedness of all life.

A more palpably human presence is seen in her portraits. Chico Mendes depicts the Brazilian who came to symbolize the Amazon rainforest and the equally endangered rubber tappers it had supported for centuries. Mendes was silenced a few years ago by bullets from an “unknown” assailant as he confronted powerful land owners in a political showdown. And Belizian Manvine reveals Don Elijio Panti, the centenarian Mayan shaman of Belize, in a cloak of emerald vines and crimson hibiscus — an empathic state of communion with the earth and its extended family of beings.

And that is the crux of it, for Don Elijio an ambassador from a timeless reality beyond surface appearances, informing us that we are all still dwellers in that Eden of communion with the natural world — if we can learn to see beyond the superficial ego brain that severs us from the natural mind. It is a view Bishop alludes to in her portraits and in her words — in that briefest of artist statements “All of my paintings are landscapes.”