Peter Doig

Yutaka Sone

Tom Thompson

The Beagle

This painting illustrates my fascination with natural selection, and specifically the simultaneous discovery of it by Wallace and Darwin.  I kind of wish I lived in a time period where you could still make a living as a naturalist- traveling, cataloging, and sending specimens to natural history museums.  It is thrilling (and difficult) to imagine how groundbreaking Origins must have been.  Life and chaos suddenly had a direction through time, and biology was given a central theme. The human species could finally be put in context, and the mystery of our existence explained.  Artificial selection could have a conceptual basis, and could be honed as a science as well as an art (or an accident).  Biodiversity came to be understood as stability, and the intricacies of biological structures could be given an explanation that was equivalent in elegance.  Beauty was not created by God, but rather chance, competition, adaptation, ecological niches, and biological innovation.  In short, beauty was created from sex and a fear of dying.

Bones, from Georgia

I went through a period my senior year of high school in which I looked at a lot of Georgia O’keeffe paintings and made some of my own work on the theme of bones (also cat skeleton).

Bones are incredibly elegant manifestations of form and function. Despite rarely being seen, they quietly dictate morphology and movement.  They divulge secrets about the life of the organism they composed, such as how it hunted, ate, and procreated.  Bones record ancient suffering such as drought, famine, and catastrophe. In fact, Georgia O’keeffe spent much of her time in New Mexico at a mass burial of Triassic creatures, otherwise known as Ghost Ranch.  Here, a massive herd of Coelophysis theropods died in a flash flood 215 million years ago.  The bone quarry not only revealed the earliest appearance of bird-like characters in the fossil record, but provided hundreds of individuals to compare of various ages, physiologies and genders.  Several skeletons were preserved fully articulated, an invaluable find for paleontology.

Myra Dog

I fell in love with this dog at the rock tombs in Myra, Turkey.  He lived there with his girlfriend, who was much shyer but just as beautiful.  I don’t think they are owned by anyone in particular, but must be fed because he looked healthy enough.

Wildlife

These are pictures of wildlife I have “encountered”- a blue (?) whale off the coast of Western Mexico, a pronghorn antelope near the Black Hills of South Dakota, and a moose in Yellowstone National Park.  The moose just stood in this same position by the lake for probably hours, staring off onto the water.  Pensive or senile, I wonder?

Wildlife: Seeing a wild animal is an all too rare experience (especially in the US), and one that gets me every time.  There is something about seeing a being of another species, minding its own business, perhaps aware but not much concerned with our presence that reminds us of an important (and sometimes gratifying) reality: that despite how we engineer our ideal environments and surround ourselves with our own kind, our entire population barely registers in terms of global biodiversity.

Kiki Smith