Meditations on Ancient Forests

A number of things inspired me to undertake this project and to make it a collaborative venture.  Visual art is a lonely pursuit.  We tend to spend long hours in the studio or darkroom.  We come out of a Modernist tradition which has resulted in an alienation from our audience and each other.  I’m sick to death of alienation, separation, lack of community.  I felt that Ancient Forests might represent surviving intact and functional biological communities-a natural order of wholeness and integration, natural communities where everything worked together.  I find that the second and third growth forests we normally experience remind me of human society, overcrowded, choked with undergrowth and lacking in healthy diversity.  The tree farms lumber companies point to as responsible ecological activity give me the horrors.  Who would want to live in that world?  I find it curious that those who oppose responsible sustainable conservation of our natural resources demand incontrovertible proof that continuing as we are would destroy our world.  By the time we find out for sure it will be too late, and even if we were wrong, the world would be a far better place to live in if we act responsibly now. 

Throughout the history of art, artists periodically exhort each other to go back to nature, nature is the source, nature is our inspiration.  It seemed time for that again.  It was Yeats, I believe, who said that an artist must speak in a language consonant with his own time.  It is my hope that Dick Knowles and I might find a language consonant with this time to address this most ancient and vital subject.  It is my hope that we might contribute something to saving the few remaining patches of ancient forest.  There is certainly no way we can create new ones. 

Lawrence Jasud