Amber in wilderness!

Professor Heneghan asked us for a discussion of wilderness, especially after our individual exploration of the Art Institute. Throughout several courses with Heneghan, I’ve always had a really hard time coming up with an answer for this and for the definition of things like “nature” and more recently “city”. While I still don’t have an exact answer, nothing that every last person could decisively agree on, it seems a bit clearer to me after visiting the Art Institute for our assignment. As I walked my straight line down the cool, dim halls, I tried to select paintings that immediately fired the word “wilderness!!!” in my brain. I didn’t want to think about it and analyze. I didn’t want to be logical and rational about it. I just want pictures that registered as being wilderness instinctually rather than cognitively. The history of human life has been deeply entwined in nature. I hoped by letting the most primal parts of my mind identify wilderness for me, I might actually be able to understand what it is. I found myself over and over choosing paintings that depicted wild, sometimes violent scenes. Wilderness to me seems like the parts of the natural world that man can not tame. They may be savage and terrible but there is still deeply embedded beauty in a thing that can’t be bridled or subdued, like a wild horse or a storm cloud.
Some of the scenes showed people at the mercy of wilderness, often cowering and tucked away in the corner, like painting “The Eruption of Vesuvius”. I guess I chose them because they weren’t peaceful, idyllic scenes with people picnicking in the grass with a clapboard sided house in the background. Wilderness is wild. It commands respect and it does not bow to people that feel the need to control and regulate their environment. Wilderness has its own regulations, even if they seem messy or violent. I loved paintings of churning, stormy waters tossing boats around. Even if people were present in the paintings I choose, they were at the mercy of their environment. They could no more control the boat they were on than the waves themselves. Wilderness was their sea captain. The paintings I identified as wilderness often weren’t even what most people would call beautiful. Sometimes it was jagged, rocks rising still and stoic from a frothing gray sea, as in “Rocks at Port”. Wilderness is not necessarily classically beautiful; its beauty comes in its wildness. I think it may be why we’re often drawn to people who seem free, passionate, and “wild”. It reminds us of something that tugs at outskirts of our mind from a long time ago when we were imbedded in the wilderness, when it controlled our fate. I like the independence of wilderness, and its demand for respect. I like the idea of savage beauty and something that man can’t control or harness or break. I’m still not precisely sure what wilderness is, but these are the things it made me think and feel when I thought I saw it.