"NATURAL HER STORY"

Paintings Celebrating "Care in the Community" - the Inductive Nurture of Wild Life

By Alan D M Rayner

This set of pictures comes from a series painted over a span of more than 30 years based on personal reflections alongside my professional work as a biological scientist and ecologist. The paintings explore the diversity of living systems in terms of how they both shape and are shaped by their environmental context in ongoing processes of ‘natural inclusion’ and ‘relational transformation’ in which one cannot change without changing the other. These processes depend on the receptivity of natural openings, opportunity spaces, through which a natural, co-creative partnership between assertive, male and inductive, female agencies can be forged along their dynamic interfacing boundaries, as at a river’s banks. They result in the reciprocal attunement of one with the other in a continuing, unfolding NOW, rather than the purely assertive imposition of one upon the other leading to an adaptive ‘struggle for existence’ in split-apart space and time. Independence is impossible. His story of assertive self-sufficiency is insufficient; her story of inductive incompleteness is vital. Nature requires nurture, care in the community. A common passion.

"BALLETIC TERN"

By Alan Rayner, Oil on Board, 1971

Balletic Tern

A delicately counterpoised tern, balanced above a moonlit enclosure of sea, takes in with the spread of its beak, wings and tail, contrasting scenes of highland and lowland, dryness and wetness, darkness and light, framed by tangles of fuchsia, bramble and quaking grass.

^ Top
 

"PANDA"

By Alan Rayner, Oil on Board, c. 1984

Painted for my younger daughter, Philippa, because she loved Pandas.

^ Top
 

"KOALA AND OWL"

By Alan Rayner, Oil on Board, c. 1984

Painted for my older daughter, Hazel, because she loved Koalas and Owls.

^ Top
 

"OTTER"

By Alan Rayner, Oil on Board, c. 1990

Painted for my daughter, Philippa, because she loved otters. The painting includes some favourite themes of recession, water droplets and the fractal patterns of fern fronds.

^ Top
 

"IVY RIVER"

By Alan Rayner, Oil on Board, 1997

An ivy river sweeps down from its collecting tributaries in steep-sided, lobed valley systems in high mountains, through dark forest and out across a sunlit, starkly agri-cultured, flood plain. Thence it delivers its watery harvest through deltas of leaves and fruits to a sea filled with the reflection of sunset. The fruits and leaves of a real ivy plant fringe the view of the distant river. The erratic pattern of veins in the lobed leaves contrasts with the focused pattern in the unlobed leaves and reflects the difference between the energy-gathering and energy-distributing parts of the river.

^ Top
 

"TROPICAL HEIGHTS AND DEPTHS"

By Alan Rayner, Oil on Board, 1998

Painted for my friend, Rytas Vilgalys, following a meeting in Puerto Rico where, on successive days, we explored first a coral reef and then a rainforest, heralded by a blast blown through a conch shell by our navigator. The ascending, spiralling cavities of the conch shell refer to the venation pattern in the yam leaves, the climbing ferns and the termite trails in the forest. Their boundaries contain an underwater scene in which corals and sea fans relate to the architecture of trees, tree ferns and mosses in the forest, and fish reflect the descent of raindrops.

^ Top
 

"CONCH QUEST"

By Alan Rayner, Oil on Board, 1998

Painted in the same vein as "Tropical heights and depths", this was for me and my wife, Marion, as a reflection of our spiritual quest together to find meaning in the diversity and richness of life patterns.

^ Top
 

 "INTERTIDAL HIGHLANDS"

By Alan Rayner, Oil on Board, 1998

A standing wave of sugar kelp leads in from the ocean edge across mussel-bound rocks strewn with a chain of starfish. Brown, red and green algae, lichens and barnacles, limpets, sea anemones and dog whelks array themselves in zones and cyclic progressions under the angry gaze of a red-eyed, lurid swimming crab who surveys his kingdom from a bed of pepper dulse. Vulnerable brittle stars insinuate their way towards shelter. Choughs ride the air waves.

^ Top
 

 "PLAIN BROTHERHOOD"

By Alan Rayner, Oil on Board, 1999

Silver and gold strands of rain and sunlight are strung, harp-wise, from the sinewy, strong legs to bass clef wing plumes of a male ostrich with negligee of black belly feathers. Black-backed, pink-palmed, male hands, modelled on my hands, emerge like primary feathers from white coverts and fiery secondary feathers in the wings of crowned cranes, mutually supporting each other’s one-legged stance. The hands stretch out to pluck the harp strings. Wet season gives way to dry, across a sinuous path on which two warriors stand one-legged, spear-supported to left or right, vigilant yet content and open-handed in the generosity of their unconditional love. Swallowtail butterflies link darkness and light from giraffes to zebras. Acacias transform stems to leaves. An egg cracks open, perpendicular to the hatching plane to reveal – what? This is where I came from.

^ Top
 

"RETICULATE CONCERTO"

By Alan Rayner, Oil on Board, 1999

Painted for Tom, Barbara, Emme, Patty and Sam Bruns who visited Bath and England from Berkeley, California. Tom studies mycorrhizal fungi and evolutionary trees, and his e mail name is boletus. The painting picks up these themes and connects aspects of Bath and England with aspects of North America and California. A Boletus reticulatus fruit body, with organ-pipe tubes, Berkeley hillside cap and Golden Gate Bridge over fog-strewn Bay, emerges out of a forest network tapped into by Indian pipe plants and broken into by fire and poison oak. Redwood columns emerge from the network, supporting a fan-vaulting of least parsimonious branches conjoined by the Gorgon's Head of Sulis Minerva. Yosemite waterfall and oak moss lichen cascade between the columns. Yosemite valley stretches into the distance, the deep blue sky given point by a passing turkey vulture. A real-life internet connection.

^ Top
 

"FRINGE FESTIVAL"

By Alan Rayner, Oil on Linen Canvas, 1999

Patterns in Cladonia lichen, Marchantia liverwort and blue fescue grass combine with rock and water to create an illusion of fireworks, ocean spray and bepalmed tropical island, overlooked by turreted light and dark towers and surrounded by incoming wavelets and sandy shore bedecked with castles of child’s play.

^ Top
 

"TRIPLE ENTENDRE"

By Alan Rayner, Oil on Board, 1999

A lost, last, low speed train draws out of blackness towards open sky across a viaduct. The viaduct is supported by the cyperaceous triangular cross-section of a stem of wood club-rush containing air- and water-filled channels and framed by the left and right sides and head-on symmetry of three emerald and yellow grasshoppers fused by their antennae into a chaotic three-way attractor. The triangle is wedged between domains of grass and sedge, each with tripartite flower arrays and inhabited by grasshopper and sedge warblers with their fishing reel and grating voices. The traverse of a harvest mouse conjoins the domains and so in its own small, sweet way makes the whole interdependent, multidimensional scene possible, complete with sound and visual reverberations.

^ Top
 

"RECALCITRANCE"

By Alan Rayner, Oil on Canvas, 2001

A 'Star Thistle' (Centaurea calcitrapa), complete with enormous involucral spines, is included within the vacuole membrane ('tonoplast') of a plant cell, seen in cross-section, which it distorts but does not puncture. The cell is intra-connected to six neighbouring cells through 'plasmodesmata' in its cell wall, which appears as a golden cage. Two of the neighbouring cells are blackened and sealed off, their internal membranes having been ruptured by six-pointed star-shaped crystals of ice that have formed within their boundaries.

There have to be some hard edges in all of us, in all life. In its place, this hardness protects and empowers; it has beauty. But when it gets out of place, misplaced, it becomes a source of damage and irritation, whether inwardly or outwardly directed. So, take care not to abuse it.

^ Top
 

"ON BEING A HERMIT CRAB"

By Alan Rayner, Oil on Board, 2001

Oh, What Hell
To Be
In a Shell!
It's So Unkind
To Be So Confined
With No Room To Move
Or Get Into The Groove
This Inner Space
Is Such a DisGrace
I Gotta Get Outta This Place!
I'll Squeeze Through The Gap
Out Into The Light
Oh, But It's Much Too Bright!
And My Body's Pap!
It's Not So Cool
To Be In This Pool
There's a Hole New World Out Here
And It Makes Me Feel Queer!
Perhaps It Might Be As Well
To Be In a Shell
Where I Won't Feel Bare
Look! There's One Over There!
So, What the Hell
I'll Be Me In a Shell!