Really?

Of course “art imitates nature” — until the first artist, that’s all there was. From then on there was nature and art to imitate. Lest we forget, nature is the original and art is imitation.

Imitation of Priest

imitating a 

"dead cat in the middle of the road"

When an artist is satisfied with an imitation of perceived reality it is shown to others out of the genetic instinct to communicate. Civilization is the exclusive evolution of the human species and its food; a spur off the main line of the hunter-gatherers’ eat or be eaten caution in dealing with hunger to the more sophisticated risk/reward of the winner-take-all profit motive predation among one’s own species.

Creating a spear, while obviously an imitation of nature’s array of puncturers, until decorated or carved to imitate a fang or talon, is less a work of art than a tool of predation, as are all weapons. Of the plethora of man’s artifice strewn about in nature, more is used to establish man’s exclusively superior “stewardship” over nature than to communicate with it; shutting out nature as caves, huts and tents give way to houses living in permanent crowds around markets for equally domesticated foods.

Art used to imitate nature, and still does for the few artists that can still recognize it and want to communicate it into the cities’ individual isolation chamber dwellers. Art used to imitate nature, but now the imitations are mostly guises to gain access to and exploit natural resources in support of our increased desire for increased isolation from and ignorance of the pollution of such increased abuse of nature.

I call this plot of land on the wooded banks of the Colorado River “going back to the garden” due to its remove from the city and relatively open spaces to grow my own food. It was an auto graveyard before being crudely sculpted to be an eight acre imitation of nature. What gardens succeed here were raised above the oil soaked, auto part incrusted soil like any city dweller would on a roof. I have also begun to realize, after last summer’s drought killed many young trees along the borders, that I am in the middle of an imminent, geologically predictable desert stretching from Texas’ Big Thicket to the Pacific Ocean, making my return to nature not only an admitted imitation but a foolish one as well.

Imitation of Priest 

imitating a playmate

 to get pip to play

I never dreamt of returning to the undomesticated state of nature we call the wild. I still have an urge to become more feral in the sense of understanding which of man’s imitations to which I am still attached are true gestures of symbiotic respect and which are merest, sincerest flattery to get usury in the door.