1. I decided to make an afternoon of it over in Spokane before our Science/Nature book group met at 6:00. My first stop was the Northwest Museum of Arts and Culture where I wanted to see a new exhibit of European paintings from 1500-1900 called An Eye for Detail. I enjoyed this exhibit, especially the eyes of the subjects of the portraits and some of the humor in the different paintings.
Most of all I enjoyed the contrast in style between the paintings in this exhibit and those in a larger room of James Lavadour's paintings in his show called Land of Origin. The European paintings were of recognizable subjects, painted in a more naturalistic style. Yes, some of the European paintings exaggerated their subjects by distorting faces and other features, but the scenes and portraits closely approximate what we would see if were at the different places or saw the person portrayed in the picture.
By contrast, Lavadour's paintings do not represent what our eyes see when we look out over an Eastern Oregon landscape. Rather, the paintings are emotional renderings of these landscapes, focused much more on how the landscape might make us feel or on the emotional and mythological histories of these places.
The European paintings give us the pleasure of seeing perspectives of scenes and persons familiar to us. (I can tell that's a brothel. I can tell that's Venice. I can tell that's a classroom. That's a man. That's a woman.)
Lavadour's paintings invite us to feel danger, awe, reverence, and other subjective experiences, to think of landscapes as sources of emotion, not necessarily as sites of external beauty.
2. I cruised N. Monroe. I'll go to Chowderhead another time once I've nailed down the relationship between apps on my cell phone and parking places! Zozo's was closed. So I returned to Kindred for a Korean beefsteak sandwich and a house garden salad.
I headed south on Monroe to Indaba Coffee to review parts of The Mosquito in preparation for tonight's book group meeting. I enjoyed a latte and it turned out that a guy seated a few yards from me was someone I first met at Whitworth about fifty years ago when I was a senior and he was a freshman. It was Bruce Hafferkamp. I had seen Bruce in Spokane at a Shadle Park basketball game in 2017 and again in Kennewick at a Shadle baseball game in 2019 (he was the athletic director at Shadle Park High) and it was terrific to see him again and have a quick and solid conversation and an exchange of phone numbers.
3. Members of the book group seemed to agree that The Mosquito was much more of a history book than a science or nature book. Pretty much everyone appreciated the history, but members wished he'd delved more deeply at certain junctures into the scientific aspects of the mosquito itself and other related topics that Winegard mentioned but left underdeveloped or unexplained.
I saw the points these group members made and agreed.
I didn't say anything about how I thought this was a fascinating nature book, especially since I think of human beings as part of nature, not outside it. In The Mosquito, we learn how mosquitos seriously and fatally affected humans who came into the mosquito's domains, but we also learned how humans affected mosquitos -- humans transport mosquitos and create breeding grounds for mosquitos by clearing land, compacting soil (creating standing water after it rains), collecting water in barrels and other containers, and in other ways. By trying to eradicate mosquitoes with insecticides (like DDT), humans also contribute to the resilience of mosquitoes as they develop resistance to these poisons.
After attending this group for three discussions of three different books, my imagination and understanding has been most deepened by each book's examination of the relationship between humans and the soil, water, plants, animals, and insects of the non-human world of nature.
And, yet, we humans act as if we live apart from and are superior to the soil, water, plants, animals, insects, live as if they are not us, and we tend to value them for how we can use them, manage them, and/or control them, whether it's salmon, wolves, beavers, wetlands, apples, tulips, potatoes, cannabis, whales, eels, mountain lions, and more, all of which I've read books about, books which all deal in one way or another with human hubris and mercantile ambition.
I'm left with questions, lots of questions, about human behavior and motivation, not only in humans in general, but my own behavior and motivations regarding nature, too.
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