"LIVING SPACE"
Paintings Exploring the Human Need For Nature
By Alan D M Rayner
This set of pictures comes from a series painted over a span of more than 30 years based on personal reflections alongside my professional work as a biological scientist and ecologist. The paintings seek to reveal 'the environment' not as some 'otherness outside of ourselves', which we can detach ourselves from and that competes for our attention with our social, political and economic self-interests, but rather as a vital 'Living Space'. In common with all life forms, we both embody and are embodied in this space, from which we are as inseparable as whirlpools from a body of water, as energy flows within and between our insides and outsides in an ever-unfolding story. If we abuse, neglect or misunderstand this space in our rationalistic efforts to control, exploit and predict it, we ultimately abuse, neglect and misunderstand our Selves.
If we are to sustain our quality of life on this planet, we need to attune with our living space, which is as much our inheritance as our genes.
- Tropical Involvement
- Arid Confrontation
- Broadland
- Loving Error
- Fountains of the Forest
- Oashiss
- Roller Coaster
- I'm-Migration
- Opening Endings
- Future Present
- The Hole in the Mole
- Breathing Space
"TROPICAL INVOLVEMENT"
By Alan Rayner, Oil on Board, 1972
This painting, made after my final examinations in Natural Sciences, depicts the dynamic complexity of living systems. A turbulent river rushes between rock-lined banks from fiery, tiger-striped sunset towards unexpected tranquility where it allows a daffodil to emerge from its shallows. A night-bird follows the stream past intricately interwoven forest towards darkness. A dragonfly luxuriates below a fruit-laden tree, bereft of leaves. Life is wild, wet and full of surprises.
"ARID CONFRONTATION"
By Alan Rayner, Oil on Board, 1973
This painting, made when depressed after a year of postgraduate research, depicts the limitations of unempathic, analytical methodology. At the end of a long pilgrimage, access to life is barred from the objective stare by the rigidity of artificial boundaries. A sun composed of semicircle and triangles is caught between straight lines and weeps sundrops into a canalized watercourse. Moonlight, transformed into penetrating shafts of fear encroaches across the night sky above a plain of desolation. Life is withdrawn behind closed doors.
"BROADLAND"
By Alan Rayner, Oil on Board, 1976
Painted after a holiday on the Norfolk Broads, this contains a rather elaborate heron, a marsh harrier and a bridge to nowhere, reflecting the relief of tension in that watery landscape.
"LOVING ERROR"
By Alan Rayner, Oil on Board, 1998
This painting illustrates the dynamic interplay between differentiation and integration, irregularity ("error") and regularity, and negative draining and positive outpouring that is embedded in living system boundaries. The erratic fire in the venation of a lobed ivy leaf is bathed in the integrating embrace of a heart-shaped leaf which converts negative blue and mauve into positive scarlet and crimson. The midrib of the heart-shaped leaf emerges as a bindweed which communicates between extremes of coldness and dryness.
"FOUNTAINS OF THE FOREST"
By Alan Rayner, Oil on Board, 1998
This was painted for the British Mycological Society, in my year as its President, to depict the intra-connectedness of trees and fungi.
Within and upon the branching, enfolding, water-containing surfaces of forest trees and reaching out from there into air and soil are branching, enfolding, water-containing surfaces of finer scale, the mycelial networks of fungi. These networks provide a communications interface for energy transfer from neighbour to neighbour, from living to dead and from dead to living. They maintain the forest in a state of flux as they gather, conserve, explore for and recycle supplies of chemical fuel originating from photosynthesis. So, the fountains of the forest trees are connected and tapped into by the fountains of fungal networks in a moving circulation: an evolutionary spiral of differentiation and integration from past through to unpredictable future; a water delivery from the fire of the sun, through the fire of respiration, and back again to sky, contained within the contextual boundaries of a wood-wide web.
"OASHISS"
By Alan Rayner, Oil on Board, 1998
Painted to depict the vitality and unpredictability of the partnership between DNA and water, the informational traffic and the contextual waterways, of living systems. A riverine snake, with DNA markings, guards a water-hole in a desert of sand particles blown into waves. Pebbles at the edge of the water, modelled on the "stone cells" ("sclereids") that make pears gritty, are separate, yet interconnected via their cores. A goat skull and a fish out of water show the effect of exposure to dryness.
How do we react to the snake? Do we attempt to control and predict its movements? Do we recoil from it? Do we relate ourselves to it? Which of these reactions promises most, or most threatens our quality of life?
"ROLLER COASTER"
By Alan Rayner, Oil on Board, 1998
A ferny-feathered blue roller, streaming upwards, transforms a dusty brown study of books and analytical devices, precisely but incoherently arrayed out of perspective of table-top context, past claustrophobic, tar-spotted sycamore woodland, into an eternal quest for belonging. Bookshelves become rock strata whose caves have protected ancient scrolls through ages riven by the pain of conflicting aspirations. A sun, the magnification of hidden powdery mildew fruit bodies on the underside of green-blotched leaves casts its beauty into the eye of the beholder.
"I'M-MIGRATION"
By Alan Rayner, Oil on Canvas, 1999
Implicit in the outward forms of migrant birds and animals are travellers' tales of flights and treks, of arrivals, departures and time in motion. The migrants bring with them a cultural heritage that enriches the lives of residents. In its long journey, an English Swallow, dark from above, light from below, swallows landscape. Its travail begins in the elemental South African solar heat that is transformed by photosynthesis into Protea flowers. The heat generates a propelling force that carries the bird over veld, above water-seeking springboks, across deserted sand dunes and dark-light realms of fluttering hoopoes until green-topped, white cliffs signal arrival time before May begins to bloom. Speedwell urges onwards; forget-me-not reminds of home; cowslips reflect the strengthening warmth of rising sun, and terns join in aerobatic arrival celebrations. But where is the welcome for human immigrants?
"OPENING ENDINGS"
By Alan Rayner, Oil on Canvas, 1999
An elm tree’s demise, its wing-barked boundaries opened by ravages of bark beetle and fungus, makes way for new life to fill its space. Maple leaves take over the canopy between earth and sky, but their coverage is only partial, leaving openings for arriving and departing flights of woodpeckers. Fungal decay softens the wood to allow the tunnelling of long-horn beetle larvae and probing and chiselling of beak-endings. A nest cavity provides a feeding station between egg and air.
"FUTURE PRESENT"
By Alan Rayner, Oil on Canvas, 1999/2000
The gift of life lies in the creative infancy of the present, whence its message from past to future is relayed through watery channels that spill out and recombine outside the box, re-iterating and amplifying patterns over scales from microscopic to universal.
"THE HOLE IN THE MOLE"
By Alan Rayner, Oil on Canvas, 2001
I AM the hole
That lives in a mole
That induces the mole
To dig the hole
That moves the mole
Through the earth
That forms a hill
That becomes a mountain
That reaches to sky
That connects with stars
And brings the rain
That the mountain collects
Into streams and rivers
That moisten the earth
That grows the grass
That freshens the air
That condenses to rain
That carries the water
That brings the mole
To Life
"BREATHING SPACE"
By Alan Rayner, Oil on Canvas, 2002
Painted in response to thoughts and images received during visits to Karlstad, Sweden and the Somerset Levels at the end of March, 2002.
Spring IS Inspiring. New leaves open stomatal windows to sky. Sand Martins swirl down from migration towards water. Egrets flutter past. A white-ribbed Silver Birch, rooted to rocky diaphragm, transforms crimson lung-branches into leaves. Coral bark fires imagination. Pussy Willow erupts into incandescent catkins. Blackthorn snow-storms. Lichens pulsate with their own slow rhythm. Space moves within and without the embodied water flows of life. In, out, together, to gather. Implicit Human Being. In Formational Lining. Attuned.