Anatomies of Spirit | Wildlife Art & Conservation

By James D. Balestrieri

As All Things Must and should, wildlife art evolves. Wildlife art begins with the old hunter-artist dyad that finds its origins on petroglyphs and its epitome in names like Audubon, Kuhnert and Rungius. Through their time in the wild and their keen sense of observation, these hunter-artists saw depredation and extinction up close and, in deploring it, helped usher in the modern environmental movement. These men—and they were, and are, almost exclusively white men—fill collections and museums with their paintings, bronzes and dioramas. The pull of their works continues to exert a romantic sense of wilderness. However, given the current threats to wilderness and to the “natural world”—I’ll get to the quotes around those words in a moment—romance is fast becoming nostalgia as wilderness begins to belong more to the past than to the present.

Now, these other currents, which might be summed up as ecocide and climate collapse, run through what 19th-century German philosopher Georg Hegel called the Zeitgeist, the “world-spirit.” Famed psychologist Carl Jung adapted Zeitgeist into the idea of the “collective unconscious,” which coalesces into widely shared symbols, called archetypes—including, crucially, animals—that reside deep within the human psyche and ultimately come to influence and define an age.

For three contemporary artists—Julie T. Chapman, Britt Freda and Laura Ball—the animals they paint come to them with persistent, recurring dreams, with the urgency of archetypes, calling us not only to appreciate the beauty of the world, but to remind us that there is no us and them, no “natural world” outside of us. Through their art, we rediscover that we are the natural world as surely as the bear and wolf, the snake and the snail, the whale and the octopus.

On fire, under water, emerging from the night sky—or all three—the animals in Chapman’s recent works explode with urgency. Chapman’s style, her take on the art movement disrupted realism, creates contrasts with “anatomical accuracy.” As she explains: “My approach arose, surprisingly, from my previous artistic body of work in scratchboard, where I depicted only the light-struck portions of my subjects, resulting in a fragmented but still readable and coherent image. This also resonated with collectors, and when I felt the urge to return to paint, I wanted to bring that ‘disrupted realism’ mindset with me. (I stumbled on the book titled Disrupted Realism [by John A. Seed] at some point a few years ago, and the work and artists included resonated with me, so I’ve considered myself part of this movement ever since.)”

In each of the three works illustrated here—GLITCH LOBO (from 2025), THE POWER TO BE (SHE FILLS THE WORLD), and an older work depicting a mountain lion titled WAITING FOR SUNSET—the animals contend with the possibility of their own dissolution and erasure as well as with what Chapman calls “digital/electronic traces” that “deliberately comment on our current world and nature’s chaotic order versus humanity’s straight lines and regular grids.” The wolf struggles to keep from glitching out, à la The Matrix; the bear with her cub seems to be trying to outrun oblivion by heat and by a darkness deeper than night; the mountain lion, awaiting her time, nighttime, seems unaware of the geometries behind her that threaten to “uncreate” her.

Why this style? “My best answer,” Chapman responds, “is that fragmenting my subject—opening the outer container of a being—lets us see into its soul. Or see our own soul, reflected…or perhaps both. And the chaos/abstraction of the backgrounds feels like a reflection of the times in which we are living. My subjects have both presence and insubstantiality, a dichotomy I find engaging.”

Chapman finds hope in the current science: “Almost every week there seems to be another scientific paper or study which illuminates the intelligence and cognition in other creatures—bees that dream! crows that solve puzzles!” She continues, “For instance, AI has recently allowed us to ‘translate’ bat talk when they are roosting, and we can all relate: they argue about food, sleeping position and say, ‘You’re too close’. I read Rudyard Kipling’s The Jungle Book countless times during my youth, and I wanted so deeply to be Mowgli—to be able to interact with and speak with animal —so now that our understanding and abilities in this regard are growing, I feel a glow of joy and kinship.” The “glow of joy and kinship” in a world on fire—which will win?

Looking at Freda’s compositions—the lozenges, like jewels, and the gilded passages that make looking at the animals in her work seem as though I am seeing through flowing, running waters, seeing through scintillation, took me back a long way. It was the second day of a three-day play, the Chester Mystery Cycle on the border of Wales and England, where, each spring, the medieval city streets become the setting for the story of Christ. As the actor playing Christ carried his cross through the town, past the people in the shops, office and pubs that became witnesses, another actor—a muscular Black man covered in mirrors—stood on a rise as God, bearing his own witness. The sun reflecting off these mirrors blinded the audience. There was nothing especially religious about it other than a quick reminder to be humble before creation. The real lesson came an instant later once the searing glint moved on: Don’t turn away. Look, see, engage the senses and the intellect, and, where possible, act. This was the mystery of the play, and it is the “puzzle,” as Freda describes it, that she wants her work to bestow on viewers.

In VIRGIL: GEORGICS (“TO FARM”), Freda paints a large honeybee over inscribed text from Book IV “On Apiculture”, of Virgil’s bucolic epic, the Georgics, written circa 29 BCE in epic Latin hexameter. Virgil extols the gods-given virtues of honey, discusses hive care and remedies for sick bees and imagines that a flayed bullock will magically generate new bees in the event of colony collapse: “[C]reatures of wondrous wise to view…swarm together, and more and more essay the light air, until, like a shower pouring from summer clouds, they burst forth…” But, of course, only bees beget bees.

The title of a 2021 work, TAHLEQUAH’S RESPAIR, J35 and J57, contains a word that is very important to Freda: respair, an old and somewhat obsolete word combining the concepts “again” and “hope,” so “perhaps fresh hope or recovery from despair.” In terms of nature, it also seems to suggest the idea of repairing, or perhaps rejuvenating the world, as seen here in the forms of the mother orca, Tahlequah and her calf, Phoenix (J35 and J57, respectively, in their pod).

A 2024 work, ∂VOL•VE, is a portrait of a creature that, to humans, seems utterly inhuman unlike us, unlikely and alien—the octopus. Through Freda’s imagination, the suckers become eyes—and they are, in their way, eyes that feel. And the reticulations hint, but barely, at what she calls the tradition of “storytelling with pattern” in Northwest Coast Indigenous arts, paying subtle tribute to peoples she works with in Northwest Artists Against Extinction. The tentacle, one of the terrors of 20th-century science fiction, becomes a gorgeous, jeweled appendage, capable of great delicacy and sensitivity. Can we say this about our own human hands and how we use them to reshape the world? Are we delicate and sensitive?

Ball finds her inspiration in the unconscious, in dreams as Jung saw dreams, in animals as symbols of aspects of our psyches, aspects we suppress and ignore at our peril, and the world’s. As she puts it, “I do consider the creatures to be ‘wild life’, but not in the way animals are wild in the world. The animals become stand ins for our wild tendencies, bits of our shadow or ancient selves that we don’t access in our daily lives. This wild side lives in us and makes an appearance when we act out of character.”

She goes on to explain the philosophy that underpins her aesthetic: “As for dreams and the unconscious—the subconscious is where all of the buried parts of our humanity live, those parts would be connected to our animal/primal selves, we don’t use these in our very social lives…” And then, “the archetypes that we see in dreams come from an ancient shared body of knowledge. So, in short, the subconscious is our connection to nature, and also the source of our dreams, hence the connection between dreams and nature.”

This, in turn, helps us understand her creatures as constructions, made from other animals, containing other animals and why, for the most part, she paints them against a blank, white background. “When I was creating these creatures, the building of them and the binding of them was all consuming and the primary focus for me, how they held on to each other, how they were tied together. Adding a scene would detract from that focus and put the creature in a relationship with a location, moving through a landscape and possibly adding a narrative that I wasn’t interested in at that time…” Further, Ball sees “the painted work as a refuge for the species that are going extinct, a place where they are collected, bound together into an energetic form.”

IN THE SUN OF THE HEART, a 2022 composition from her Creatures series, sees the outline of a wolf filled with a menagerie of other animals while CELESTIAL MAP, from her Mandala series, casts the cyclical creation/uncreation/creation of the world as an ouroboros of archetypes that we should strive to move from our dream states to our waking lives. Ball reveals that she has been “devastated over the state of the living things on this planet and how we humans contribute to so much destruction and pain for the creatures we share the world with. I know that the pain I felt researching and working would pour into the work. I am very sensitive, so this has all been heavy and heart breaking over the years. I never talked about it much. I just hoped that my deep emotions would convey something to the viewer that they would absorb.”

Looking at Ball’s RAINBOW TRAILS, at the head of the snail in what seem to be multiple exposures, iterations over time; at the shell in its Golden Ratio, Fibonacci spiral, the shape of things that have been, are, and will be, from galaxies to flower petals to DNA, unearths a line from a poem I can’t quite remember: “And a spiral-shelled snail leaves a silvery trail through the sand where a castle once stood.”

Castles rise and fall, as do empires and epochs. I was thinking about how to end this essay while walking into town with my wife to get our steps in and pick up some bread at the bakery when, from high above, just under a sky that was a scallop of scumbled gray clouds, there came a trilling, almost metallic, very loud and very insistent and very alien. If we hadn’t known what it was, we might have told a fantastic tale about it. But we knew what it was, what they were—whooping cranes, a small flock of them, once endangered, now back in all their strange, beautiful, Midwestern tropical splendor, calling to one another in early spring. Not alien. Not alien at all.

When we look at art, we often imagine the past, the artist’s past experience and vision, and our own past as works spur and transform memory into present sensation. Look at the art of these three women—Laura Ball, Britt Freda, Julie T. Chapman—and imagine a future, a collective unconscious, if you will, in which their art chronicles lost opportunities in a long-lost past where hope still held out.

This story appeared in the June/July 2025 issue of Southwest Art magazine. Subscribe today to read every issue in its entirety.

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