These are times that try men’s, and women’s, souls. The struggle is real, and resistance must be diligent. But can we sustain such effort without recourse to the personal, the peaceful, the natural – that is, to the very things and conditions we are trying to protect, as they protect us? To make art at this point is to rally the resistant, and to resist oneself. As such, even painting landscapes and flowers and forests and the very corners of one’s abode is a political act. 

Such activist consciousness is not new to the art world, of course. For decades the cutting edge of artmaking in the United States and many elsewheres has militated against war, racism, homophobia, and ecological stress, in the studios no less than in the streets, but also in the gardens and the woods, natural environments where feminist artists, eco-artists, queer artists, and artists of color have reasserted their creative identities. The pastoral meditations of David Hockney alone speak powerfully to the identification with nature sustaining those (even those conventionally successful) who suffer under the status quo.