Light comes into the human eye through a single lens. But like the compound eye of a bug which receives information from multiple points of view, the human brain understands that single shaft of light by sending it through innumerable, interpretive lenses, each ground into a unique shape by genes and polished by experience.

Living in the rain forest of Ecuador for two months was physically uncomfortable. From moment to moment I felt my body probed for weakness so that it could be reabsorbed into the biomass at the first opportunity. Pricked and irritated by heat and dampness, I began to see the life in land as exploitive and grotesque.

At night lightning illuminated the forest like a horror movie on a television playing in an empty room.

In the light of day, parasitism paraded as lushness and…

a poisonous nature was flaunted through a display of brilliant color.

Blossoms took the shape of spears and fists and sported petals as thick as lips.

And the trees, competing for light, grew into odd shapes that were a record of their striving. But now that I have left, the distress of the body no longer dictates the story and other lenses in the compound eye of the brain can focus the image of the forest into a wider angle.

I remember the grotesquerie, but I also think about the vitality. The weather, for example, is as capricious as a teenager. Although the light and heat and humidity are constant throughout the year, the rhythm of each day is unique. Clear skies rapidly mushroom with fat white clouds that darken and hurl drops that sound like a carpenter’s rasp as they tear through the leaves. Sometimes the rain passes like an express bus, but sometimes it is as fixed as a waterfall at full flood, roaring for hours.

The greenery is so dense that it can induce a panic attack. But the light offers relief. Like Matisse with a pair or scissors, the sun cuts sharply through the canopy creating melon slices and asterisks of light which spread across the sky in a jumpy rhythm. The visual jazz is accompanied by birdsong that is in turn as sad a Mahler, as sweet as Satie and as rude as a whoopee cushion.

The agents of decomposition thrive here and consume every helpless scrap with a speed that is unnerving. As a result the occasional, drifting thought on mortality which lands in this over-ripe place is fertilized beyond reason and bursts into sex and …

other creative adventures, like painting pictures in the rainforest with the eyes of a bug.

October 27, 2007, 92° F, S 01° 02, W 77° 36, Ceyba tree, rainforest

October 28, 2007, 90° F, S 01° 02, W 77° 36, rainforest

November 7, 2007, 80° F, S 01° 02, W 77° 36, bananas and rain

November 10, 2007, 87° F, S 01° 02, W 77° 36, canopy and ant nest

November 11, 2007, 80° F, S 01° 02, W 77° 36, banana, light and wind

November 16, 2007, 83° F, S 01° 02, W 77° 36, leaves

November 21, 2007, 80° F, S 01° 02, W 77° 36, canopy

Juanita lives with her husband, Anibal Torres, and their four children in the San Cudo Community, which is a mile away at the end of the path by the river. San Cudo is named after a type of mosquito, not an obscure saint.

The night before my visit to Juanita’s home, the rain fell, heavy and drenching for 8 hours without a pause. The Rio Napo breached its banks and the canoes were pulled up near the path for safety. We set out for her house after lunch, but the track to her house was still flooded and fish were swimming among our feet. With a leap and cry of, “Pescado!”, Juanita lanced one with the tip of her umbrella and wrapped it, still flopping, in a foot-long leaf to carry home.

The Torres-Cerda family lives in a five room house. The ground-floor room is mostly for storage. The stair to the second story leads into the kitchen, which has a large window, without glass or screens. Off the kitchen are two bedrooms and a family room with TV and VCR and a couple of beds for lounging. There is electricity but no running water, so rainwater is collected in the cistern for cooking and washing. The bathroom is in a small separate shed behind the house.

At home were three of Juanita’s four children, Edison, Andrea and…

baby, Natalie, who enjoyed chicken for lunch. Couples tend to have large families in this region and are proud of the fact. In a place were income is small, perhaps many children and…

many chickens are satisfying sources of wealth. After the kids and fowl were fed, Juanita and I followed the line of laundry into the garden.

The laundry, like family flags, hangs on a rope that stretches from the house deep into the garden. Sheets and towels and shirts and shorts hang flat, until they catch a little breeze and inflate into the shape of people whose sweat and stain is bleached and sweetened by the sun. It’s better than confession to watch laundry on a line.

The clothes line ends at a quiet stream, which catches the light of the sky and tucks it beneath the lemon trees.

Unlike gardens in the North which are sown and harvested on a timetable set by the seasons, this garden grows and dies everyday. Lines and grids are suitable for gardens on a schedule, but a garden with no beginning or end forever evolves and the shape it takes is irregular and temporary.

When the banana tree flowers, fruits and falls, the trunk quickly rots adding nutrients to the soil, which is so quickly rinsed to depletion by the constant rain.

The space left by the old banana tree is used for a new crop of yuca, a ubiquitous plant whose tuber is a staple of the Amazonian diet.

Besides yuca and bananas, the garden produces plantain, corn, rice, beans, potatoes, tomatoes, cucumbers, sugar cane, papaya, cacao, grapefruit, lemons, limes, and a variety of medicinal plants like, Sinviyo, (pictured above) which is a natural insect repellent.

Juanita also grows Cuyamuyo, a fruit whose hard shell is used for bowls. Like fancy china, this tableware can be monogrammed.

The stream feeds a fish pond which is stocked with Tilapia and ringed with beans and bananas, and …

another lemon tree loaded with the drooping nests of the Oropendola.

Hidcote and Longwood are glorious but this little equatorial garden is just as lovely and more poignant for feeding the family of Juanita Cerda.

The following 7 works were created out of doors in the Oriente of Ecuador near the primary forests of the Jatun Sacha Foundation. Arranged chronologically, the paintings are mostly complete, although touch up may be necessary when I see them in the studio. The title of each painting includes the date that the work was begun, the temperature of the moment, the latitude and longitude of the place, and a verbal description of the subject that motivated the painting.

October 10, 2007, 94° F, S 01° 02, W 77° 36, 2007, orange spotted butterfly

October 11, 2007, 89° F, S 01° 02, W 77° 36, caciques and heliconia

October 14, 2007, 90° F, S 01° 02, W 77° 36, morpho butterfly

October 20, 2007, 89° F, S 01° 02, W 77° 36, rainforest

October 22, 2007, 91° F, S 01° 02, W 77° 36, rainforest canopy

October 26, 2007, 88° F, S 01° 02, W 77° 36, rainforest canopy

November 1, 2007, 92° F, S 01° 02, W 77° 36, , elephant ear shoots

Standing at the easel studying the landscape, I realize that converting this visual cacophony into an “artistic composition” requires willful incomprehension. There is no subject here, only a density of detail. Dynamic lines and suggestive forms abound, but to comb clarity from the tangle, to make the impure immaculate, is to misconstrue. People like to differentiate and rank to make order; it is said to be an ancient need to differentiate prey from camouflage or a modern need to build the ego by distinguishing it from everything else. But these evolutionary strategies and psychological accommodations do not separate fact from fiction. The truth about art is here in the rainforest; the world is competitive chaos and artworks that represent the world as a series of discreet and understandable moments are lies. And artists are nothing more than agents of denial and perpetrators of delusion!

It would be treachery to represent this in the traditional manner, and isolate a few forms from the morass and enshrine them in layers of smoothly unfolding space. No, the truth is that there is little middle ground or deep space in the jungle. All is compressed into a block of foreground which is itself sliced into infinite parallel planes, each with it’s own drama.

It’s deceitful to separate the mist…

from the leaf,

or the leaf from the butterfly,

or the butterfly from the light,

or the light from the water,

or the water from the root,

or the root from the tree,

or the tree from the owl,

or the owl from the prey. Making a comprehensive picture of this anarchy is impossible. This is all too much. I’m overwhelmed. I’m going to lunch. Damn, I stepped on the grasshopper.

Two
This morning a million red-bottomed ants hurry to the forest floor via the highway. The opposing 4 lanes of this 8 lane intrastate are not side by side, but superimposed, so on-coming traffic is either dodged or mounted. Dead leaves, whose empty veins are the last to rot, pave the road in slippery shades. A finger sized stick, stripped and smooth on one end and flowering with mold on the other, is easily traversed by this living stream of air breathing invertebrates, who hook and climb in unison to make a knobby ribbon of thoraxes and abdomens that arc over the cylinder on six-times-a-million legs.

Upon arrival they spread out to recover the dead and pillage the living. A squad reconnoiters a lace-winged grasshopper crushed by a careless human step. Since the carcass is too large to recover whole, a division of labor is imposed and an artful dismemberment is commenced. The juice of the head is already being sucked by a dozen small beetles, so labor is focused on removing the legs and sectioning the abdomen for transport. Within an hour nothing but a little stain is left and the red-assed squad is headed to base carrying a hind leg. Since the limb is awkwardly long and the serrations along its length catch easily, the load is assigned to three ants who enter traffic carrying the leg like a telephone pole on an eighteen-wheeler. Up to speed in the cruising lane, the leg-transport team is passed by a speeding group of eight who carry a whole millipede raised like the Madonna in a holy day procession. All march safely home and the forest floor is swept clear for the next bit of protein to fall.