Our Earth—the enveloping atmosphere, vast oceans, life-giving soils, profusion of plants, and grandly varied animals—each aspect of our planet needs our care-filled attention. This whole-hearted engagement becomes personal and possible though direct experience. Whether we’re field scientists, rock climbers, photographers, writers, or anglers, each path of perception reaffirms our place on the Earth and Earth’s centeredness in us. Yesterday, when ice-glazed streets edited my original out-of-town plans, I decided to check out two artists’ attention to nature through a new exhibit in the Corrine Woodman Gallery at the Arts Center: “Connecting with Water, Journeying Through Art”, featuring local artists Abigail Losli and Diane Widler Wenzel. The small and intimate exhibit granted me a chance to slow down and appreciate the creative and significant messages about water, and to consider how water and humans inter-permeate the course of each other’s paths.

The display that immediately caught my eye was comprised of Abigail Losli’s 16 individual acrylic panels, together entitled, One, Two, Three, Four, Five, Six Seven, Eight, Nine, Ten, Eleven, Twelve, Thirteen, Fourteen, Fifteen, Sixteen. Losli, who earned her Bachelor of Fine Arts from OSU, found her inspiration for these pieces through her repeated retreats to the Willamette River near her home, where she found time and space to pause, breathe, be still, and observe. Her work is alive with the river’s color and movement, each panel representing “a single visit, a moment of connection.” In her artist’s  statement, she admits that through her direct, meditative experience with the Willamette River, she gained an even greater awareness of all the ways people build their lives around water, affirming the rich connections and traditions that surround it. Her work exemplifies how environmental art can illuminate the outer and inner life of both artist and viewer.

The other featured artist, Diane Widler Wenzel, chose several spontaneous, non-objective abstracted paintings for the exhibit. (Non-objective means the painting’s purpose is to represent that which is not a thing.) Wenzel sees art as a journey—a way of thinking, learning, and growing. Her work has therefore become a journal of her life. With a painting and drawing degree from PSU supplemented by decades of close connection with the outdoors through camping, hiking, white-water rafting and boating, Wenzel strives to visualize her place in nature’s mystery, and encourages viewers to listen to the art itself. And indeed, I was struck by her painting entitled, From Silent Slack Waters, which effectively embraces the quiet lull and curve of watery silence. I was entranced by her success in capturing within her paintings not only the quality of emotion, but also that of sound, made possible by way of her keen journeying among inner as well as outer shorelines.

Wenzel and Losli’s art enriched my day immeasurably. My moments with their paintings confirmed for me the necessity of art for deepening our range of environmental expression well beyond the ordinary world of words.