Five percent, that’s all that remains after thirty years of brutal decline. Five percent of the Northern Lapwings we once had in Norway. A dramatic decline caused by changes in agricultural practices such as increased mowing, spreading of manure, drainage, intensification, and mechanization, but also habitat destruction and urbanization. And the 100,000 lapwings hunted each
This observation will stay between me and her. Her the White-backed Woodpecker in front me or her the forest I kneeled in to draw? Both. Both rare, both disappearing, threatened, and hidden from the world. Their inaccessibility and their remoteness have so far saved them, along with our ignorance. A state of things ever more
“Watch out! don’t step on it!” Yes, it is indeed one of these places where you have to make sure not to step on a puppy Fur seal. A place, where you have to make sure its mum doesn’t come and bite your fingers off. Where you have to watch your back for the males
Five minutes before I loose sight of the coveFive minutes before the clouds engulf the mountainsFive minutes before the ship turns and distorts the perspectiveFive minutes before we are blinded by the fog.Five minutes before all disappears behind this rocks. Five minutes to encapsulate a world.Five minutes to fix a future memory.Five minutes to aggregate
It should have been water. It was ice.We should have been just entering. We struggled our way in.Floes put on our track as a way to slow down. Everybody onboard slowed down.Away the excitement of the ever more, bigger, closer.You’re just caught by the landscape.And as you navigate the sea ice, you navigate your thoughts.The
I’ll sleep there because the day before, a silhouette slipped in at the foot of this short cliff. A shadow between the trunks and black rocks of this forest, long after sunset. Third night in my sleeping bag, between the pines and blueberries, covered with a camouflage net. It’s mid-March. In this valley sheltered from
“We [naturalists] try not to appear as weirdos, in our eyes and in those of Society, by camouflaging our anxiety at seeing nature disappear with fear of dying of hunger… But, if we were shown that the repression of nature can continue without economic damage, we would not be relieved, we would be saddened. So
I saw it with the naked eye standing out on a ridge. A few trees hide me, a light wind in my favor that carries my scent far away. I advance slowly, cautiously thanks to this Mountain Hare that I came across half an hour before. It was in this forest of birches with an
It almost makes me think it’s a habit, but what are the chances? They are rare in this region, so much so that it is forbidden to hunt them. Most of the inhabitants have never seen them, even after decades of hiking in these mountains. It is the largest of our land mammals and the
Protecting nature, conserving, preserving, saving, rescuing, restoring, repairing… An obvious fact for some, an absurdity for others. I am one of those who care, but I remain skeptical about the reasons that push us to act. Or more precisely, I am convinced that we misunderstand the reasons for our actions, that we greatly underestimate the
I left to explore plateaus that are a few hours’ drive from home, with the secret hope of finding reindeer there. No need to keep the suspense going, I didn’t see them. On the other hand, I found subtle hints of the Arctic there. A feeling that is barely felt but whose difference is surprisingly
I look away from my paintings, from my exhibition. My eyes roam the room and glance over the stuffed animals of the “Vår Natur” (“Our Nature”) exhibition at the Natural History Museum of Stavanger. Among them, a wolf. But unlike the other animals here, this one doesn’t stand proudly. The taxidermists have not rendered the
Peregrine falcon in the distance in the heat haze. As is often the case in this kind of situation, I draw too big. It is small, too small, in the eyepiece of my spotting scope. However, I paint it large on my sheet of thirty by forty centimeters. The usual consequence is that I get
« As soon as you see something,you already start to intellectualize it.As soon as you intellectualize something,it is no longer what you saw. » Shunryu SuzukiSeptember 8, 1967 As enigmatic and obscure this quote may seem, it is a very powerful description of the main predicament the drawer-from-observation is facing. He wants to paint his
« One death for one life, a fundamental principle of life on Earth. A sentence which can be delayed, which can give the illusion of being circumvented, but which, whatever form it takes, will always end up falling. It is the necessity imposed by a finite world, our planet, on which life has sought to fill
© Adrien Brun
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