W a y n e Meineke, Courtship
Parade—Trumpeter
Swans, oil, 1993.
What is wildlife art worth to conservation?
Donald Luce, curator of the Bell Museum of
Natural History, talks to the Volunteer about
wildlife art and its value to the environment.
By Kathleen Weflen
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sell conservation. So says David
Wagner, an expert on American wildlife art prints
who spoke at a recent conference on art and the
environment. The conference opened Wildlife Art
in America, a show of more than 100 works by North
American artists that runs through May 15 at the James Ford Bell
Museum of Natural History in Minneapolis.
The show's paintings, sculptures, drawings, and prints trace
the development of wildlife art in this country. They begin with
work by John James Audubon and other artists and naturalists
who came from Europe to the New World, continue with "sporting" artists like Winslow Homer, and finally feature 20th-century
ILDLIFE ART HELPS
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1994
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John James Audubon, Brown Thrasher, hand-colored engraving, 1826-38.
work with an emphasis on ecology. The artworks reveal the way
Americans have viewed wildlife over time and suggest a longterm relationship with conservation.
Wildlife art has long been a powerful educational tool, says
Wagner. Outdoor sporting magazines, for instance, have been
using wildlife art to promote conservation for more than a
century. Sportsman George Grinnell first hired wildlife painter
Carl Rungius to illustrate Forest and Stream in 1873. Field and
Stream, Sports Afield, and other magazines soon followed. For
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more than 50 years, The Minnesota Volunteer, too, has relied on
wildlife artists to help clarify facts and ideas about natural
resources. It has featured the work of Walter Breckenridge,
Roger Preuss, Les Kouba, and many more.
In 1934 the federal government put art to work for wildlife. A
committee appointed by President Franklin D. Roosevelt devised
the federal duck stamp program to help restore dwindling
waterfowl populations by requiring every waterfowl hunter age
16 or older to buy a stamp. The first stamp featured Mallards
Dropping In by political cartoonist J. N. "Ding" Darling. "A tax
glamorized by art," the duck stamp institutionalized the
conservation movement, says Wagner.
Also in 1934, with the publication of his first field guide, Roger
Tory Peterson gave Americans a way to enjoy wildlife without
hunting. A Field Guide to Eastern Birds has sold more than 4
million copies and introduced millions of Americans to birdwatching. Today, half of the adults in America enjoy watching
wildlife. The influence of Americans interested in wild game and
nongame wildlife has led to landmark environmental legislation,
including the Endangered Species Act.
Though the educational and inspirational value of American
wildlife art may be incalculable, artists today may not have
exploited art's full potential for shaping our attitudes toward the
environment. In the following interview by the editor of the
Volunteer, Donald Luce, curator at the Bell Museum, explores
past, present, and potential relationships of wildlife art and
conservation.
Kathleen Weflen: What is wildlife art?
Donald Luce: In general it's artwork that depicts wild animals
rather than domesticated animals. Most work comes from either
a sporting or a scientific orientation. Wild animals in traditional
fine art—for example, paintings by Rubens [1577-1640]—are
often stand-ins for human emotions. The lions represent human
rage or the human struggle against our animal nature. Wildlife
art, on the other hand, attempts to accurately depict and understand the animals themselves and our relationship to them.
K. W.: What was the first wildlife art?
D. L.: The original cave paintings were probably the earliest
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Wildlife Art
attempts. You can find throughout art history and in many
cultures depictions of wild animals with an attempt to
understand them.
If you look at Renaissance art, Diirer's hare is a great example
of a work in which an artist wanted to understand this organism.
Much of mainstream western art has separated itself from
nature. There might be many reasons for that: Christian traditions
emphasizing human domination over nature, other western traditions measuring everything in terms of humans as the supreme
creation, academic traditions that separated art and science.
Courbet, a 19th-century realist, did a painting of two deer. The
artist was so trained to paint the human figure that when he
paints these animals he makes them humanlike in their gestures
and position. They seem to be stand-ins for human nudes.
Even in scientific illustration you see some of this reliance on
human form. In the 16th and 17th centuries, artists did compilations of images of every kind of animal known. They would
seldom actually go out and look at the animals, even common
ones. They would copy illustrations from earlier volumes. Many
illustrations were done entirely from written descriptions of
animals. Some were done by monks in monasteries; and so you
have seals, for example, that were drawn very monklike.
With the exploration of the New World, you had species that
were really new. Some illustrations were worked on from
specimens that were brought back as skins or preserved in jars.
There's a great illustration of an anteater. In trying to make the
image more acceptable to Europeans, who thought a wild
animal was not acceptable as art, the artist put the anteater on a
pedestal with a few Roman columns in the background and a
few ants on the ground.
Later, artists-naturalists came to the New World to study
wildlife directly. John White, for example, in the mid-16th
century came over to document some of the resources that were
available to potential colonists. In many of these images, you get
a sense of the artist's appreciation for these organisms.
Mark Catesby was sent over in the early 1700s by collectors in
England to collect and record the natural products of the New
World. They were looking for plants and animals that they
could use or simply add to their collections. Yet this process of
observing the animal and plant builds appreciation for them.
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Carl Rungius, Three Old Gentlemen—Mountain
Goats, oil, 1930.
Catesby's drawings were crude in many respects, yet they have
a freshness and charm, and they convey the joy of discovery.
K. W.: Everyone associates John James Audubon with early
wildlife art and conservation in America. When did he come into
the picture?
D. L.: In the early 19th century. Audubon had some artistic
training, but not so much that western artistic traditions overwhelmed his vision of wildlife. The story is that he came to take
care of his father's business ventures, but he spent all his time
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Francis Lee Jaques, Caribou on Ice, oil on canvas, late 1940s.
hunting, painting, watching birds, dancing, and playing music.
Audubon was instilled with the romanticism of that time.
Rather than seeing wild nature as a symbol of the devil, people
in some circles were perceiving nature as God's work, unblemished by human culture. Audubon painted wild animals for their
own right. They weren't objects of the hunt or symbolic images.
They were just wild animals painted for their own beauty.
The work is full of drama and action. It is somewhat melodramatic by today's standards, but it was tremendously appealing to the public. It fed upon this new image of wildlife as being
exotic and exciting, and it became very popular in North
America and Europe.
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K. W.: Was this a new audience for wildlife art?
D. L.: Yes, this was a much broader audience. There was
growing interest in natural history in the late 18th and early 19th
centuries. Audubon was able to bring art and science together.
His work overshadowed most of the work that went before it,
and it influenced the rest of the 19th century.
Audubon was working during a time when people were
beginning to appreciate wildlife, but they still thought it was an
inexhaustible resource. By the end of the century, Americans
started getting concerned about the loss of this natural resource.
Conservation groups named themselves after Audubon.
There was also growing concern within hunting-sporting
communities. After the American Revolution, sport hunting
was looked upon as an aristocratic tradition from Europe. Most
Americans hunted for sustenance, not for pleasure. That
changed by about the mid-1850s. Because of urbanization,
hunting started becoming recreational and not just a sport
exclusive to a particular class—although you often needed a
certain wealth to be able to make your hunting trip to the
Adirondacks. Paintings of hunting scenes were reproduced as
prints. Currier & Ives prints of hunting exploits were a way for
people to remember the contact they had with nature.
Many of the painters like Winslow Homer were trying to look
at the relationship between man and nature. There is a struggle
and violence in nature that hunters and people who lived on
the land recognized. Darwinism emphasized the connections
between organisms and that organisms are a product of the
environment in which they have evolved.
In trying to paint wildlife, Abbott Thayer discovered camouflage and cryptic coloration—that organisms are colored in a
way to make them blend into their environment. Most artists
are trained to paint the human figure and describe form
through light and shadow. When Thayer tried to paint wildlife
that way, he discovered that the animals look very flat because
they are light where shadow falls and darkest where the sunlight illuminates them, so that the light disguises their form and
makes them harder to see. This principle is called countershading—an animal has a white belly and a dark back.
Audubon never discovered that because he didn't paint light
and shade. He painted feather by feather, more or less like bird
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Wildlife Art
maps describing the bird as a specimen rather than an organism
in its environment.
K. W.: What role did hunting play in wildlife art and conservation?
D. L.: It was artists who came more from the sporting perspective who were the first to depict animals in the environment. The
conservation movement in this country was largely supported
by sporting groups. They wanted to be able to go out and find
wildlife, to feel as if they were a part of nature.
Homer hunted and fished. Carl Rungius was a big-game
hunter. He painted moose, elk, and deer, and primarily sold his
work to other hunters.
Francis Lee Jaques [who painted the diorama backgrounds at
the Bell Museum in the 1940s] came from a hunting tradition,
but he had contact with naturalists and other scientists through
his museum work. He wanted to show the animal as part of the
natural system. He understood ecology better than any other
artist. Artistically, when you compose a picture you have to have
a certain tension between different elements—a balance of color,
shape, form. He saw that also. You can see art and the ecosystem
in much the same way, with balance and interdependency.
K. W.: How much do wildlife artists simply reflect the thought of
the time? And how much do they contribute to the perspective
of the public?
D. L.: In communicating information with visual and artistic
form, they are tremendously important. When you see a species
and have a name for it, you have something to place a value on.
By allowing people with field guides to know the species without shooting it, Roger Tory Peterson brought wildlife to the
largest potential audience. This knowledge of species is a basic
foundation for building environmental awareness and appreciation. Hunting and gathering cultures know all of the species and
often have deep respect for them. Wildlife art has been extremely
important in maintaining our connection to the natural world.
Looking at wildlife art today, you can ask: Does wildlife art
give us too pretty a picture? Why don't artists paint animals
being killed? People can criticize wildlife art for showing perfectly rendered wild animals in a perfect environment. A lot of
contemporary wildlife art is very nostalgic. Yet it gives people
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Robert Verity Clem, Eskimo Curlew, gouache, 1966.
something to relate to. It's hard for a lot of people to get excited
about nature in the abstract.
There is still a great deal of resistance in the wildlife art
community to showing death scenes. Most people in the mass
market for prints don't want to have a dead animal. Even an
Audubon print that shows a peregrine pulling apart a duck sells
at auction for much less than his other work. People still want to
see nature as harmonious and non-confrontational.
I find it a little bit disconcerting that there's still this whole
notion that wildlife artists go out and paint directly from nature.
The idea that an artist can produce a highly detailed painting of a
bird in flight simply by watching wild birds—that's basically a
fairy tale. Wildlife artists, like most artists, have always relied on
a variety of references. Their field experience would be combined with studies from captive animals, dead animals, and
specimens of various sorts. The artwork that is popular today is
derived largely from photography. I would like to see wildlife
artists listing as their influences photographers like Eliot Porter
and Ansel Adams.
Wildlife artists are doing photorealist paintings. They are
copying the way the camera sees nature. Some will deny it,
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Rosetta, Siblings—Mountain
Lions, bronze, 1992.
some won't. Most will say they use the camera, but they also
use their field experience, which is legitimate. But the way
nature is depicted in wildlife art today is a photographic view.
It's not the way you and I really see nature by going out and
looking. For example, some artists paint the background out of
focus like a camera would see it. Yet it looks real to most people
because that's the way we see nature today—on the television
screen and through photography. So if you were to paint nature
like you saw it, most people wouldn't buy it. They want to see
the way a high-speed photographic lens sees a bird.
If you watch people on safari, you'll see everyone looking at
nature through the camera lens. It's a new way we see nature.
It's not necessarily good or bad or wrong—it's just different.
Wildlife artists tend to deny this in part because of the issue of
authenticity. Drawing directly from nature is seen as authentic.
There are artists who are trying to paint outdoors from nature. A
local artist here is Wayne Meineke, who does a lot of painting
outside. Sherry Sander does very expressive and impressionistic
sculptures. Robert Bateman walks a fine line between photographic image and painting. You see the influence of good
nature photographers in his paintings, but they are not direct
copies of photos. He certainly has direct knowledge of nature.
K. W.: Does wildlife art today make any contribution to conser-
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vation that photography does not make?
D. L.: One of the contributions that it should make but doesn't is
to challenge viewers to question the way they see things. Wildlife art would be more acceptable as modern art if it did what art
should do: to recognize and explore new ways of seeing things.
If the wildlife artist were to paint from photography and make a
point of showing us that we are now seeing the world through
the camera lens, that would be a challenging perspective.
K. W.: What is wildlife art doing for conservation?
D. L.: It's still maintaining a large segment of the population's
interest in natural history and wildlife.
It has raised a lot of money for conservation with the duck
stamp, and certainly a lot of artists donate prints or do other
things for conservation. But fund-raising is a fairly minor role.
In the big picture, you are not going to save nature by setting
aside a wildlife sanctuary. The kinds of threats wildlife faces
today are so great. People have to question how they're living
their daily life, and I don't think most artists challenge that.
I don't think it's impossible for wildlife art to do some of this.
There are a few artists like Rick Pas. Coming from Flint, Mich.,
he combines cars and wildlife. The Highway Robin shows a
dashboard of a car, a windshield, and a rearview mirror. A
robin is about to strike the windshield. The driver is seen in the
rearview mirror, looking startled at the robin. It is in a photorealist style, with no attempt to hide photography's influence.
This image could challenge people to think a little bit about their
lives in relation to wildlife.
K. W.: What would you like people to learn from the Wildlife Art
in America show at the Bell Museum?
D. L.: They are going to see good wildlife art, and they are going
to see it in a historical context. We'd like people to understand
how attitudes toward the environment and wildlife have
changed over the years. My hope is to broaden appreciation for
wildlife art as a means of expressing our human desire to
understand the beauty and value of nature. •
For more information about Wildlife Art in America, call the Bell
Museum of Natural History, Minneapolis, 612-624-1852.
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