Drawing Water began as a traveling art and science exhibit in which six artists and six scientists joined to explore the complexity, beauty, and future of northern lakes. The project was so successful that it has been expanded to include additional periodic exhibits, an annual artist in residency program, collaborations with other art/science programs, and occasional programs for the public and youth.
|
Left: Pollens and Peat, pastel by Terry Daulton
When you study a lake sediment core sample, it's like taking a trip through time. In this painting, I illustrated the beautiful pollens that indicate changing landscape conditions over time. These tiny pollen particles were viewed through a false color electron micrograph. In Northern Wisconsin Lakes, white pine pollen (at the bottom of the painting) is commonly found in sediments at depths corresponding to pre-European settlement, and I use them to indicate climax forests. The dark horizontal layers represent ash, which appeared in many lake sediments after the "cut over" when forests were decimated and wildfires burned across Northern Wisconsin. After fires, pollen from white birch and quaking aspen indicate change to early successional forests. I placed red oak pollen at the top of the painting to illustrate the future, when climate change predictions suggest warming temperatures will favor red oak. Below: Of Bogs and Benthos by Bonnie Peterson
This work presents scientific graphs, limnology terms, lake chemistry concepts, demographics, and climate challenges using embroidery and heat transfers. |
Above Trout Lake by Ann Singsaas
Though scientists are here for research purposes, we know they are also here because they value the beauty of these lands and waters. They work in the hopes that all their effort can help protect these Northern gems. While scientists work out of curiosity, conservationists work for the love of the land. Trout Lake Station houses both. This painting was done on a June evening just as most of the field crews were coming in for the night. After docking boats and storing equipment, each person took the time to stop, stand on the shore and quietly stare at the lake they see everyday.
Though scientists are here for research purposes, we know they are also here because they value the beauty of these lands and waters. They work in the hopes that all their effort can help protect these Northern gems. While scientists work out of curiosity, conservationists work for the love of the land. Trout Lake Station houses both. This painting was done on a June evening just as most of the field crews were coming in for the night. After docking boats and storing equipment, each person took the time to stop, stand on the shore and quietly stare at the lake they see everyday.
Ebony jewelwings
A bog is an odd place to write a history book. It’s dark and oozy in the peat, but perhaps this is how all history emerges. I leave the pollen analysis to the scientists who have to strain over microscopes while I watch the ebony jewelwing damselflies dance, smell the exquisite perfume of the horned bladderwort, poke around for dying insects in the flared vases of pitcher plants, and bounce on the bog mat like a child on a trampoline while the cold water creeps into my shoes. In Europe, they’ve pulled two-thousand-year-old people out of bogs with the nooses still around their necks, their bodies bronzed in the bog tannins. They were flung there in dishonor, the manicured grass burial grounds unfit for their kind. But I like the quiet here, the small wildness. Perhaps it was more of an honor than they supposed to be tossed aside to settle slowly among the many lives that have had to struggle so long in the cold moss. To sleep among the orchids, the cottongrass, all the anonymous sedges, maybe to arise again two thousand years hence among the clamoring scientists amidst the wild peace that will still be in the hovering hum, perhaps that would be a grace after all. - John Bates 
Above by Terry Daulton
Anyone who visits both sides of Allequash Lake will be amazed by its split personality. Here I picture species from both basins, a map showing upland forest cover, and I hope capture the mood of each side of the lake. This particular lake is a perfect place to consider how physical characteristics of uplands and basins effect lake ecology and to see how the native species respond to a lake's chemical and physical personality. In the Black Muck
In September in the black muck the rice has fully risen, arched high like prairie grass on Kansas loam. Not long ago on this shore Ojibwa would have been dancing the rice their singing carrying over to the nearby lakes meeting other ricing songs also on the wind. Fires would have been built to roast the rice the smell of maple, oak, birch. There would have been a strong breeze to winnow the husks away as they tossed the little clouds of rice rising and falling from the baskets, the puffs of chaff disappearing within the trails of the smoking fires. All of this would have been happening amidst the constant chattering of blackbirds which arrived today in clouds, as they surely have for thousands of years, all cousins and aunts and uncles, all coming to gluttonize the rice. We have friends that will collect 100 pounds of rice today, their single mindedness necessary to cook wild rice stews in January. We, on the other hand, will gather some that we won’t bother to weigh and won’t eat. Later, we’ll toss the seeds into another riverbed and hope the rice will come up. After all, we’re in a heaven of distractions. The wind, the songs, the clouds, the dreams, weigh nothing. -John Bates 
Above: Vanishing Act by Melinda Schnell
The school of walleyes in this painting is fading away as the rainbow smelt increase in numbers. All smelt are not alike, and this particular smelt, the rainbow smelt, have a devastating effect when introduced into our small lakes. Over a period of time the rainbow smelt could seriously deplete the game fish we prize in our Northwoods lakes. This piece was originally titled "Tipping Point" on two separate pieces of paper to emphasize the point in time when the walleye will disappear, later it occurred to me that "Vanishing Act" might be a better title. 
Above by Terry Daulton
In this piece I am making an allusion to the famous painting by George Seurat, "A Sunday Afternoon in the Park". I suggest that we see lakes only as a surface for our picnics, swimming, and relaxation. The sunbathers at Crystal Lake are unaware of the complex relationship between native perch and the invasive rainbow smelt, The rainbow smelt invasion in Crystal Lake has disrupted the ecosystem and significant management is required to restore the system. 
Above: Gimme Shelter by Melinda Schnell
Submerged tree branches provide cover and a feeding area for fish that depend on aquatic insects, minnows, and small fish for food. This still night
Let the beauty we love be what we do. There are hundreds of ways to kneel and kiss the ground. – Rumi On this still night, the stars reflect from the black water blending the horizon between sky and lake so that I’m a little dizzy a little unsure of where I am until a lost breath of wind ripples the water and my canoe rocks for a moment reminding me of the tremors in my life that are no more than this this holiness briefly stirred only briefly stirred, this holiness. - John Bates |
Left by Terry Daulton
If you explore the research from the Trout Lake limnology station, it is like taking a trip through time, from the last glacier to future trends. In this painting I show a train and the view from the site of the historic railroad station. The young woman is holding a piece of scientific equipment, a secchi disk which is used to measure water clarity. I suggest that science data over the years can be exciting, as well as critical to the health of lakes. The Trains
What is really here now? A train stopped here in 1910 people stepping off into a wilderness of stumps carrying fishing poles and parasols plows and dreams. What is really here now? Four hundred-year-old white pines grew here. The Ojibwa raised corn and potatoes at the river mouth traded furs buried their dead in conical mounds. What is really here now? The winter wren sings a hundred notes in seven seconds. The dragonfly sees the world through ten thousand lenses. The bumblebee lands on ultraviolet runways. The lake trout finds the river mouth and spawns. We are half awake to it all. It is who we are this imperfect body this brilliant bounded mind that illuminates only corners of the darkness. Now, mostly the invisible happens. I wish I knew everything that stops here now and then in another century which ones won’t. - John Bates 
Above: Lake Impressions by Ann Sings
Pilgrimage
Let us bless the humility of water, Always willing to take the shape Of whatever otherness holds it. – John O’Donahue That this water has emerged from this ground to bring forth these lives – the bluegill, the loon the mussel, the lily the otter, the dragonfly – is a grace I surely don’t deserve but which I am doing all I know to embrace. The water moves in pilgrimage always kneeling on lower ground sinuous in its grace every wave another lapped meaning on its shores coming again again in case we forget where we began what we are made of where we are going. - John Bates 
Above by Terry Daulton
Of all our lake ecosystems, I am most fascinated by bog lakes. I love the weathered tops of spruce and the mysterious spongey sphagnum moss. This rarely visited ecosystem supports carnivorous plants, fish (like the mudminnow) that can breath through their skin, mink frogs, cranes, bog lemmings, a web of species exceptionally adapted to life in an extreme environment. Northern Wisconsin is at the southern edge of bog habitats. Bogs sequester carbon in their cold sediments. As the climate continues to warm, bog species will be less successful and their warming peat layers may actually release more carbon than they store. Researchers at Trout Lake Station are studying bog lakes, learning about their intricate ecosystems, and considering threats, such as future impacts of climate change. In the Labrador Tea
Along the abandoned railroad track we were gazing at the Labrador tea, their flowers sprinkled white in the bog, when a sandhill crane stood up. Four and a half feet tall, it simply materialized. And then another stood up just in front of it. And once we got our breath back, we started smiling at our blindness, our good fortune, their grace. Then one of them stepped away over the hummocks, while the other paced in a small circle, and we realized then she had been sitting on a nest. What luck we had to see this! though we knew we had to walk away. When we looked back, she had hunkered down on the bog mat, incubating her eggs that housed thousands of years of DNA, the evolved summation of all cranes. The day before we had watched two cranes sailing over a nearby marsh like Spanish galleons built for the wind by the finest of avian wainwrights. They never flapped their wings until they came edging down to the marsh and lowered their spindly legs, landing with a short trot. Then they paused, bowed to one another, opened their wings, leaped up in the air once, twice, and gazed down. - John Bates 
Above: Little Ripple by Ann Singsaas
Even in water appears to be a still pond, water is always in motion, and with it, all it carries. 
Above: Chase Scene by Jim Ramsdell
In this sculpture, a loon is chasing a small school of yellow perch through a section of a sunken log. The wide debris provides both a place to find food and a secure habitat for the perch. Without the perch and other small fish, the loon would not survive. You will find the face of a musky emerging from one end of the log, symbolizing its oneness with the habitat. These are some of the amazing creatures we have come to recognize as ambassadors of the spirit of the Northwoods. Losing the call of the loon would greatly diminish our experience in the Northwoods. It is our obligation as stewards of this planet to learn more about the habitats and ecosystems that are vital to the survival of all beings with whom we share this planet. |
