Nurturing Nature

One of the things I did when it was raining so much outside, while I had been dealing with some winter (which was lasting a tad too long) depression, while trying to figure out what I want in my life, was to create slide shows with music.

Art has often been a thing that helps me heal, but oil painting wasn't doing that so much as I kept thinking I had to have a product when I was finished. With digital, that's not so much an issue. I can do things for the fun or to express something inside for which I cannot find words. Digital art, for me, can be like keeping a journal would be for someone else.

Music has proven to be part of this process recently even though I am not a person to always have music going. In my home, I like silence most of the time to let my own thinking flow but also so I will hear if anything is going wrong outside. Sometimes though music really speaks to my soul and I go through a period where I play it a lot.

A few years back, I had seen a friend's photographs put into slide shows with music and I really liked that idea. It wasn't until I got involved with [Picasa] that I realized I had a tool that would let me do the same thing. First it was for my photographs and I shared some of that here. Then I realized it would work with my digital paintings. The next idea was-- what about creating art just for a piece of music?

That's what this is, a mix of my own ideas and some that I created especially to go along with a song. The song is from the children's movie, Pocahontas (which I have incidentally never seen) but I have the song on a Disney CD. The lyrics are [here]. I have loved its message and melody since I first heard it as it's about seeing the beauty around us, responsibility to nature, and understanding that we are all connected. The Nurturing Land is about two things-- how nature nurtures us and we nurture it.

[The Nurturing Land]

The art in this video is all mine, a combination of digital and oil paintings with the emphasis on digital. With two exception (the imaginary wolf howling at the moon and the painting of dancing around the medicine wheel) they are all places I have been, inspired from photographs I (or Farm Boss) have taken.

I have been fortunate in my life to have been allowed to richly experience a part of the world that I love so much. It's still here in places, open and wild, because earlier generations fought to keep it that way. I hope future generations will be able to say the same thing.