Streams in the Wasteland
Streams in the Wasteland
Josh Tiessen
On Visual Art, Ecology and Eschatology
I was born into a civilization experiencing great upheaval. In 1995, I entered this world through a Moscow hospital, and lived for the first six years of my life in a country still reeling from recent historical events. From the beginning, I’ve been caught between the destruction of the former and the dawning of the new. With the fall of the Iron Curtain in 1991 signaling the dissolution of the Soviet Union, all hopes for a Communist utopia had long dissipated and a new world of freedom was on the horizon.
For my parents, it was a fascinating time to have a baby in a country simultaneously being reborn. But it was also sobering, as their Russian colleagues had not forgotten the loss of relatives sent to die in the Siberian Gulag because of their faith.
Today, the specter of communism still looms large, with former KGB head Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine and the suppression of free speech. This comes amidst other catastrophes—a global pandemic, the fall of Afghanistan to the Taliban, and the ecological crisis. Jewish philosopher Abraham Joshua Heschel states, “As it was in the age of the prophets, so it is in nearly every age: we all go mad, not only individually, but also nationally. We check manslaughter and isolated murders; we wage wars and slaughter whole peoples.”
As someone who makes his living as a fine artist, in times like these I ponder what kind of beauty will rise from the ashes of destruction. In our world going—gone—mad, I wonder with my artistic impulse, are we simply entertainers providing an escape, or are we prophets exposing the chaos and destruction in order to usher in the hope for renewal?
*
My studio gallery is located in the Golden Horseshoe, halfway between Toronto and Niagara Falls. With glorious sunlight pouring through skylights, I paint to the sight and sound of scurrying chipmunks and singing cardinals just outside my windows. I am treated to forest bathing along hiking trails accessed a block away, and the lapping waves of Lake Ontario only a couple miles down the road.
As a young budding artist, I took delight in emphasizing the beauty, particularity, and diversity of the natural world. At 15 years old, I was invited to be mentored under a famous Canadian wildlife artist, Robert Bateman. Although this was a great honor, I didn’t want to be pigeonholed as a wildlife artist who paints animals in pristine natural habitats—sadly, no longer normative in our Anthropocene age.
Visiting my relatives’ Saskatchewan farm one balmy summer evening, I became fascinated with an abandoned homestead. This architectural relic inspired several Andrew Wyeth-esque works featuring farmhouse doors and windows shedding flakes of peeling paint. While some saw ugliness, I saw beauty in the brokenness and imperfection. The transience of human-made structures evokes in me a sense of humility and wonder at the power behind nature and time.
Finding my own voice in my late teens, I began a series of hyper-surreal oil paintings that grapple with the frailty of human civilization, entitled Streams in the Wasteland (2015-2021). During post-secondary education I was immersed in the study of the prophetic books, specifically that of Isaiah. The prophet Isaiah had more to say about the beauty of the natural world than any other prophet in the Bible, so it is no surprise I was drawn to his work. I was particularly intrigued by what scholars call Isaiah’s “zoological motifs.” While Isaiah is best known for his many prophecies foretelling the hope and identity of the Jewish Messiah, there are some largely overlooked passages describing desert animals inhabiting abandoned cities that have become ghost towns. Isaiah indicts a list of unjust nations: in Babylon “hyenas will inhabit her strongholds, jackals her luxurious palaces” (13:22), Cush “will all be left to the mountain birds of prey” (18:6), and in Edom “the desert owl and screech owl will possess it” (34:11).
Scholars have interpreted these passages in various ways. Some assert that the chaotic presence of animals denotes the nations abandoning their “dominion” (righteous rule) over the Earth, shirking the Edenic mandate to care for the whole of creation entrusted to them by the Creator (Gen. 1:26-28, 2:15). Nations like Babylon abused the natural order through their ecocidal warfare tactics. They were notorious for their environmental terrorism through frequent obliteration of trees, vineyards, and crops (not unlike the Vietnam War, during which the United States sprayed 20 million gallons of the chemical herbicide known as Agent Orange). I believe the zoological motifs are best understood within an honor and shame framework. The animals are employed by Isaiah in his word-pictures as an indictment to the nations’ lack of honor for their Creator. Isaiah thus records the Creator’s own words:
“The wild animals honor me,
the jackals and the owls,
because I provide water in the wilderness
and streams in the wasteland,
to give drink to my people, my chosen,
the people I formed for myself
that they may proclaim my praise.
Yet you have not called on me, Jacob,
you have not wearied yourselves for me, Israel.”
(Is. 43:20-22 NIV)
This passage, from which I borrowed the title for my painting series, poetically states that animals have the capacity to honor their Creator in a mystical way through living out their biological design, willingly receiving the blessing of sustenance from their Creator. In contrast, Israel is shamed for not calling on their Creator, or honoring him with their obedience. From this study of Isaiah’s prophecies, I envisioned multiple ideas for paintings of wild animals inhabiting abandoned human civilizations across vast time periods and cultures—with a little humor thrown in for comic relief.
*
At the suggestion of her medical specialist, my mother carried out a 23andMe health DNA test, seeing as she had been adopted as a baby and did not know her paternal ethnicity. Her test came back 50 percent Ashkenazi Jew, and surprisingly connected her to a first cousin. Through messaging with him, she soon discovered they had the same grandparents, which led straight to her Jewish biological father living in Ottawa, Canada. My mom and our family have been warmly welcomed into his life; he and his wife graciously answer our many questions about their Jewish faith and traditions. Whether my interest in the Hebrew Bible was by coincidence or providence, I now feel even more connected to the Jewish prophets of old. I resonate with Jewish artist Marc Chagall’s remarks: “For me, painting the Bible is like a bouquet of flowers. The Bible for me is absolutely pure poetry, a human tragedy.”
The prophet Isaiah constructed poetic worlds in which the surrounding empires become desolate and animals take up residence in palaces and mansions, as a way to liberate the minds of the Jewish exiles. So also today, I see my role in creating alternative narratives that call out such idols as wealth and power. If we artists don’t take this call seriously, we may be heading toward Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World where art is reduced to a simple tool that induces happiness and sensuality, blinding us from the truth.
In Hopeful Imagination, theologian Walter Brueggemann writes that the practice of prophetic imagination is the most subversive, redemptive act that faith leaders can undertake in the midst of exile because it holds the potential of unleashing a community’s action against false narratives. This subversive imagination can be seen in the work of C. S. Lewis, in which he used fiction as a way to critique industrialism and scientism, whether that be King Miraz and the Telmarines felling Narnia’s forests and defiling its streams in Prince Caspian, or the large-scale animal experimentation and environmental sterilization by an evil society called the N.I.C.E. in That Hideous Strength.
According to Dickerson and O’Hara in Narnia and the Fields of Arbol, Lewis inspired a “re-enchantment of nature” for millions of his readers. He left for us a prophetic imagination that still reverberates to this day.
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When I travelled to Rome several years ago, I toured the crumbling Roman Colosseum and the ancient temple ruins. Corinthian capitals, columns, friezes, and statues of the Greco-Roman gods had been reduced to piecemeal curiosities. Here, I began sketching what would later become The Republic, my foray into imagining human civilizations being taken over by wild animals. The work features a crumbling Greek temple with a pretentious Sandhill crane posing on the pedestal of the supreme Greek god Zeus. I was intrigued by how Alexander the Great’s empire, which extended as far as India and spread Greek culture with its pantheon of gods, eventually collapsed in the decay that festered due to internal divisions.
I continued this theme in my western ghost town paintings. Travelling through the American southwest, I visited two old mining towns: St. Elmo in Colorado and Bodie Ghost Town in California. I found it fascinating to peer into the windows of saloons, barber shops, mortuaries, general stores, and homes—it was as if everyone had dropped everything and left. The towns were frozen in time with ephemera strewn about—beer bottles, cards, calendars, dishes, coins, coffins, and guns. Once icons of progress and wealth built on the promise of gold, the buildings now lay dusty and desolate. I envisioned animals like Spotted hyenas and Black-tailed jackrabbits taking up residence inside them, as seen in my paintings Occidental Babylon and Liberation of the Jackalope.
The depictions of animals having dominion over human civilizations—nature’s reclamation—is an ironic reversal where the weak shame the powerful—where “God chose the foolish things of the world to shame the wise; God chose the weak things of the world to shame the strong” (1 Cor. 1:27 NIV). I began to see the creatures in Isaiah as the Creator’s special agents worthy of intrinsic value and a role in history. According to Isaiah scholar Alec Motyer, “The earth is seen as actively participating with God by exposing what lay hidden. This is part of the ‘moral vitality’ of creation, which is inevitably infected with human sin but never fails to be on the side of the holy purposes of its Creator.” I caught a glimpse of the larger vision for animals serving as coworkers with the Creator to confront humanity, calling from within the ruins of human moral decay.
Josh Tiessen
*
As a society, we are unable to heal the root cause of our human predicament, the sinful condition. I find beauty in abandoned ruins because they remind me that every world empire and cultural or religious institution eventually falls, because they are built on human power. When our foundation is built on this false premise of human progress, it is actually a rejection of our Creator, the ultimate source of life who “makes nations rise and then fall” (Job 12:23, MSG). Our Maker knows the terrain intimately, and he is the Great Physician who can heal our land if we will just repent of our human pride and turn to him (2 Chron. 7:14). As a result, we will relinquish our desire to manipulate nature for our ends, thereby respecting the design of God’s creation “for the beauty of the earth,” as penned by the old hymn writer.
In Margaret Atwood’s The Year of the Flood (from her dystopian MaddAddam Trilogy), she provides a rather unexpected countervision that may behoove us to embrace. Amidst a manmade environmental apocalypse brought on by a disaffected scientist (in the character of Crake) who lets loose genetically engineered hybrid animals and instigates a global pandemic emerges a humble community that call themselves “God’s Gardeners.” They resist rampant capitalism, body modification salons, sex clubs, drugs, and biotechnological experimentation in order to live a simple life: blending faith, science, and nature, as they grow vegetables and raise bees on the rooftops in the urban slums.
Could this template of countercultural Christian community be a faithful response to the Apostle Paul’s exhortation to the Thessalonians to diligently work and lead a quiet life? When I feel like we’re living in a world gone mad, perhaps it’s these small alternative communities shaped by a prophetic imagination that reveal the possibility for beauty to rise from the ashes, and in the fullness of time, save the world.
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From as early as the Paleolithic cave paintings of Lascaux, France, humans have been grappling with reality through the representation of animals. By following this ancient zoological tradition, I stand alongside literary artists like Isaiah, C. S. Lewis, and many others, imagining reality from the perspective of animals. In depicting nature’s reclamation of human civilizations with the colors of my painter’s palette, I seek to critique human-centrism and ecological exploitation. Furthermore, in the face of visceral eco-anxiety, I desire to offer streams of hope within what feels like an apocalyptic wasteland.
In my painting Peace Like A River, a pod of orcas, released from an aquarium amusement park, journey down a winding canyon river toward their intended home. In Isaiah, the imagery of the Edenic river cutting through a barren wasteland is symbolic of the eschatological hope that justice and mercy will one day reign, ushering in peace and wholeness. May the animals call us toward faithful stewardship of the planet we have been entrusted with and represent the beauty of new creation breaking through, where all idols of human progress will be cleansed from the earth. I know that one day, Isaiah’s prophecy will be brought to fulfillment, and “the mountains and hills will burst into song . . . and all the trees of the field will clap their hands.”
Josh Tiessen
Josh Tiessen
Artist & Writer
Josh is a professional fine artist, speaker, and writer based in Stoney Creek, ON. He has had solo exhibitions in galleries from New York to LA. His latest art monograph book, Streams in the Wasteland, released in fall 2021. www.joshtiessen.com
Photography by Norris Niman