By Hanna Wheeler

Julie Zickefoose is one of the lucky few who are gutsy enough to make a living— and a difference— by doing something they love.

She spends most of each day walking, observing, sketching and painting the inhabitants of 80-acre nature sanctuary in the Appalachian foothills of southeast Ohio. Her glowing watercolors and personal essays reflect careful attention and joy.

“You can reach a lot of people through writing and art,” she said. “The world is made up of so many moving parts. If I can give somebody a deeper connection to what they’re seeing outside the window, that’s a good day’s work.”

Julie always knew she wanted to be an illustrator and wanted to work in conservation. What she didn’t know was how to combine the two. After working for a non-profit for a number of years, she decided to quit and give it a go as a freelance artist.

“I realized that if I was going to starve, I might as well starve on my own rather than letting some nonprofit starve me,” she said. “I house-sat for people. I moved 10 times in one year. I lived very simply and pursued the study of nature. I’m so glad that I did that instead of saying, ‘I need to rent an apartment and get a car.’”

Now, she is the author of Enjoying Bluebirds More, Natural Gardening for Birds and a collection of paintings and essays titled, Letters from Eden: A Year at Home in the Woods. She is the illustrator of Restoring North America’s Birds: Lessons from Landscape Ecology and she served as a primary illustrator of the 17-volume work, The Birds of North America.

Julie travels around the country giving lectures on birding, painting and writing. She has a regular column in Bird Watchers Digest and her commentary airs on National Public Radio’s All Things Considered.

Julie attributes her narrative gift to her father. “Listening to him, I figured out how to construct a story,” she said.

Her father also instilled in her a love of nature. The youngest of five, Julie spent her childhood following him around the yard. “My dad grew up on a farm in Iowa. He was a real outdoors guy and great gardener,” she said.

Julie taught herself to be an artist. She was always sketching as a child. While attending Harvard for biological anthropology, she took some drawing classes. But her painting, she said, is still a “work in progress.”

“Most of what I know comes from taking books out of the library. I look at what other people do. Surprisingly enough, it’s a pretty good way to learn,” she said.

Julie is both poetic and scientific. During the interview, she described her home as “the rumpled part of Ohio,” but then switched to scientific mode, saying, “The forest is overwhelmingly oak and hickory with very little native evergreen.” Then, back to poetry, with, “This time of year is an unrelieved gray.”

When she first moved to Ohio from coastal Connecticut, she wasn’t sure she would like it. But when she saw Ohio’s wildflowers, she realized she could stay. “I enjoy living in a place that people don’t normally give any thought to. I like living in a place that has all these incredible natural wonders. That’s really all I need,” she said.

In the upcoming “Boundaries” issue of Whole Terrain, Julie writes about a rare Ohio wildflower and finding common ground with her Appalachian neighbors.

“It’s taken me time to fit into this community and carve out a place in it,” she said. Now, her neighbors come to the local tavern to see her play with her band, and compliment her on her radio and blog pieces. “There’s a lady down the holler who reads my blog on dial-up. She does dishes and laundry while it downloads. I have more readers in Ohio than in any state in the nation. I like that,” said Julie.

Julie especially appreciates her avian neighbors. “They’re my TV. They’re incredible birds and we’re so blessed to have them,” she said.

Julie urges nature enthusiasts to get to know birds as individuals. “It’s the same birds every year. I know which bluebirds lay white eggs, which are aggressive, which are passive. I know when one of the birds I know well goes missing and is replaced by another individual. Get out and work with them enough to get a feeling for their individual behaviors,” she said.

Julie has studied the consciousness of birds almost her whole life with sometimes comical and sometimes touching results.

She described once hanging an umbrella beneath a barn swallow nest in her garage to save them from a landlord fed up with bird droppings on his car. Hating the umbrella, the birds dive-bombed Julie each time she walked through the garage. But one day, Julie saw a five-foot black rat snack sliding across the rafters towards the baby birds. Climbing a ladder, she plucked the writhing snake from the rafter with a stick, lowered it into a pillowcase and took it away. “I think I invented a new phobia,” she joked.  “Ophidostepnophobia. It’s the fear of being up on a ladder with a snake over your head.”The barn swallows were completely silent the whole time, and they never attacked her again. “There’s so much more going on in the minds of birds than anyone realizes,” Julie concluded.

This anecdote and others will be in Julie’s upcoming book due out in the spring of 2012.  The book, which Julie describes as an “illuminated memoir,” focuses on different birds that have come into her life.  Its working title is Bird Woman and the publisher is  Houghton Mifflin.

Julie’s enthusiasm for birds and the natural world is infectious. And her story inspires us all to pursue what we love. “I think people are of most use to society when they do what they’re best at,” she said. “It’s a disservice to yourself not to do that.”

Julie Zickefoose is a widely published natural history writer and artist. Educated at Harvard University in biology and art, she worked for six years as a field biologist for The Nature Conservancy before turning to a freelance art career. Her observations on the natural history and behavior of birds stem from more than three decades of experience in the field.

Dancing with the Shavers Fork Headwaters by Ruth Blackwell Rogers

Ruth Blackwell Rogers describes her painting and environmental activism as “all one thing.”

“My paintings have always been trying to make visible in some way… that everything’s connected. The spirits of the trees, the highland bogs, the beavers, the river are all alive. And if we are aware of it, we know we are all dancing together,” she said.

Blackwell Rogers says her spiritual connection to the natural world has been “innate” in her since she was a child. She clarified her beliefs by studying Contemporary Core Shamanism at the Foundation for Shamanic Studies.

Her studies inspire her paintings. She has painted eight Journey series inspired by Joseph Campbell’s look at the world’s mythologies. In her Four Worlds So Far, she painted a series of images across a long scroll that she unwinds while telling the Hopi creation story. “With a good story telling, you’re in another zone,” said Blackwell Rogers. She says audience members are often completely silent during the telling. Sometimes they won’t even blink. “Everybody seems to be able to relate to it in some way,” she said.

In the act of painting Listening to Second Fork of Cheat River. Photo courtesy of the artist.

Her spirituality extends to even the process of painting. “Even my way of painting and getting the image in my mind’s eye is a little bit shamanistic,” she said. Blackwell Rogers describes how she sits still until an image forms in her mind. She remains quiet and attentive while she mixes her paint colors and applies them to the canvas. “After I get one spot of color on, it kind of rolls on from there. That first spot is the most important thing,” she said.

Her love of nature took the form of environmental activism in 1996 after a pair of devastating floods brought attention to the water quality impacts of coal mining and logging in the region surrounding her home of Kerens, West Virginia. Blackwell Rogers helped form a citizen watershed group and served as its president “to help bring people together for the sake of the watershed,” she said. She also began leading excursions and writing articles for the nonprofit West Virginia Highlands Conservancy, which works to promote and conserve the mountain highlands region of West Virginia.

Just like she does with her paintings, Blackwell Rogers tries to create harmony through her environmental activism. “Each little spot of color is alive and connected with all of the others [in the paintings]. I see a watershed in the same way,” she said. Her goal with her environmental work is to connect different groups of people living and working in the watershed: farmers, landowners, tourism businesses and the various state and federal agencies.

A painting isn’t finished yet if it’s “not quite singing,” said Blackwell Rogers. “Sometimes it’s as much as one spot as big as my thumbprint that suddenly puts the whole thing in dynamic balance,” she said.

Similarly, she’s had experiences within her environmental work where out-of-balance situations suddenly come into harmony.

For example, she collaborated with a tourism railroad line to get 20 volunteers and 1,000 red spruce saplings up the mountain for an ongoing native habitat restoration project. All of a sudden, the train stopped, and out jumped another group of people armed with cameras and clippers. This group started cutting down all of the brush in site, including red spruce saplings.

It was a moment of utter disharmony.

Instead of getting too upset, Blackwell Rogers talked to the owner of the railroad and discovered that the group with cameras was preparing for a rail fan photography trip. Because of the curve of the tracks, the whole train could be photographed, except for the trees in the way.

Part of the Shavers Fork watershed. Photo courtesy Shavers Fork Coalition

Blackwell Rogers used the opportunity to explain the mission of the habitat restoration. The railroad owner expressed his dismay over the incident and gave his continued support. The rail fans would have to have a few trees in their pictures.

“He realized he needed to be a little aware himself and make his rail fans aware,” she said. Just a little thumbprint and the whole thing was back in harmony.

In the early 1990s, Blackwell Rogers and others started a non-profit called Corridor H Alternatives to stop the building of a 100-mile section of a four-lane highway through the mountain highlands.

“Because we had some success, we got an injunction,” said Blackwell Rogers. Bulldozers were frozen in their tracks at the edge of the forest. “It was a very visible and tangible thing,” she said.

But it created disharmony in the community. People would walk across the street so they wouldn’t have to pass Blackwell Rogers on the sidewalk. They would whisper negative things about her and her husband in the grocery store. “It didn’t change our intentions or beliefs,” she said. Yet, the struggle really impacted their youngest son, who was in high school at the time. “The tension of it was difficult for him and he sometimes had a hard time at school,” she said.

A couple of years into that struggle, Blackwell Rogers was invited by a small group of artists who were starting a co-op gallery downtown. Blackwell Rogers says she told herself, “It’s not what I want to do but I’m going to do this to show that I’m part of the community.” The gallery grew to be successful and now includes about 20 artists. “We didn’t all have the same beliefs, yet we all were working together on one project. We had to be civil while acknowledging our differences. I’m so glad I made that effort,” she said.

Due to Blackwell Rogers’ efforts, environmental awareness, the red spruce ecosystem and the arts community continue to grow in her little corner of Appalachia. And it’s her love of the Appalachian landscape that enlivens her art and her activism. “Mountains embrace me and hold me. There is so much to discover in them,” she said.

The Art, Nature, Culture Class at Antioch New England transformed the old bookstore space into an art gallery displaying the finest pieces of studio work they created this semester. The opening was Thursday December 2 and was open through Friday.

The students who created this show have been studying the field of Environmental Art and Environmental Design. Environmental artists express innovative views of the relationships between humans and the rest of nature. Their approaches range from the land art of Robert Smithson to the ephemeral art of Andy Goldsworthy. A good source of information on Environmental Art is to be found at Greenmuseum.org. Environmental Designers explore how to create a more sustainable human-built environment.

Antioch New England artists have chosen themes related to their current research concentrations, and their artwork expresses concepts they’ve learned in their science and other classes. Our artists have shared interests in the perceptions of other animals, place, intergenerational relations, trees, found materials, and color theory. The Antioch artists include:

Rebecca Clark. Rebecca is a conservation biologist interested in how art helps us explore the perceptions and experiences of other creatures. She says” “Have you ever tried to imagine the world from the perspective of a bee?” Her art work is inspired by the artist Lynn Hull, who creates environmental art that other species would be attracted to, as well as scientists like Niko Tinbergen, Karl von Firsch, and Temple Gradin. Rebecca created a set of experiments to see and imagine the worlds of other animals through the mediums of painting, sketching, and sculpture . For example, Happy as a Clam draws on her field research on Cape Cod and explores the ideal environment for growing conditions of soft-shelled clams.

Emily Davis. Emily is addressing several themes: placelessness, human restoration, and a sense of belonging. She asks, “Where do you belong?” and challenges people to find what they respect about the places where they belong. Emily works with found material, moving beyond the values of “reuse, reduce, and recycle” to “research, reduce, resist, recognize, revel, read, reuse, repair, refurbish, refine, recover, reclaim, redistribute, review, recycle, recharge, renew, retrofit, and remember.” She is creating beautiful envelopes and glassware from recycled materials. She is also researching her new home of Keene, and is inspired to design a deck of cards that will introduce people to the Keene community.

Alexis Doshas. Alexis is an accomplished photographer, but in this class she took the challenge to break out the two dimensional framework into three dimensional, sculptural work. Alexis has created poignant sculptures that she says, “include elements of irony, whimsy, bittersweet, and comedy, which I use to disarm the viewer.” Her work examines the interactions between natural design and human concepts and is inspired by the writer Wendell Berry.

Stephanie Goggin. Stephanie is interested in the phenomenological experiences of infants and their experience of water animals. Stephanie works at the intersection of art and craft. She has created a series of useful textile crafts for babies. They revolve around the themes of sea turtles and water, and express the textures and colors of water. She says, “Art can be beautiful, dangerous, uplifting or dreary….For me, art is a way to bring beauty to the practical.”

Andrew Hays. Andrew is interested in systems theory, and is focusing on the circulatory system. He’s exploring recurrent patterns that show up in many different natural forms, and contrasting the circulatory system in the human body, trees and the water cycle. Andrew is also interested in color theory, especially how black influences the color of different media.

Michael Metivier. Michael has been exploring what it means to come to terms with revelations in one’s own history. He has written a series of poems on “witness trees,” a concept he embraced in his landscape class. What does it mean to witness, to be silent and “pass,” to come to know one’s ancestors in an unexpected way, and to speak the truth?  [Read his poem "Atavus" on the Whole Terrain blog home page.]

Heather Ruggiero. Heather is reacquainting herself with her ancestral home in Vermont. She shares with the Impressionists the desire to capture subtle changes in the colors and textures of forests. An accomplished watercolor painter, Heather has been experimenting with watercolor collage to capture moments in the Northern Forest. She is experimenting with the way watercolors interact with highly textured paper.

Joshua Shawver. Josh comes with experience in costume design, and has been playing with the qualities of tree bark. He draws upon metaphors between tree bark and fabric, and recreates the functional qualities of birch bark with fabric textures. Josh’s whimsical pieces mimic objects in nature, what he calls, “an arborial connection of fabric and nature.”

Anne Stilts. Annie inherited tubes of acrylic paint from her grandmother and was inspired to create  knife and palate pieces on tile. Her highly textured studies express her concerns about the beauty of found materials that we are so quick to toss. Annie’s highly textured, richly colored expressive experiments have brought Annie to a place where she feels she is creating authentic art.

Alesia Maltz, Ph.D., is a core faculty member of the Environmental Studies Doctoral Program at Antioch University New England. She has served for a number of years as a member of Whole Terrain’s Editorial Board.

Ubehebe Crater by Janet Morgan
(original dimensions 12″ x 22″)

Janet Morgan is a Brooklyn-based painter of sacred landscapes, supreme beings, and belly dance. Her work has been featured in the New York Times and in gallery events in the US and Kyrgyzstan, and she has been an artist-in-residence at various places including Death Valley National Park. Janet received her Master of Fine Arts from the University of Wisconsin at Madison, and a Bachelor of Fine Arts from the Minneapolis College of Art and Design.

The watercolor featured here is part of Janet’s ‘Death Valley 2006′ collection. For more of her work, as well as contact and biographical information, you can visit Janet’s website. Her email address is artist@janetmorgan.net.

Death Valley Jet by Greg Frux

(original dimensions are 35” x 22”)

Brooklyn-based artist Gregory William Frux documents and celebrates the life of his city in oil paintings & drawings. His work has earned recognition from such diverse organizations as Brooklyn Arts Council, The Library of Congress, Lincoln Center, the Metropolitan Transportation Authority and the National Park Service.

Besides his urban work, Greg has been inspired by his time in the wilderness. His travel adventures have become sources for his art.

“When I returned to Death Valley for a second time in 2006 I had a pretty good idea I would do a painting of a fighter jet over our national park. Flying from bases in Southern California and maybe also Nevada, the military’s right to overfly the western half of the park was grandfathered as part of the agreement to add this land under the 1994 California Desert Protection Act. I looked at these metal war machines with horror and fascination. The effect of seeing something so heavy moving fast only a couple of hundred feet off the ground is stunning. The image came to me as I saw a pair of jets fly down the canyon in the Inyo Mountain which I had just hiked up. They were violently loud, amazingly fast, precise and disturbing. I have tried to capture the experience as I saw it. The apparent steepness of the dive is a product of the angle of viewing.” ~ Greg Frux

Visit Greg’s website http://frux.net/
Contact Greg at art@frux.net