Commentary

Strokes of Stardust

February 5, 2026   ·   0 Comments

By Constance Scrafield

By and large, most visual art is associated with nature. Among painters, especially, they are irresistibly drawn to reflecting landscapes in so many versions.

They make the viewer want to be there. They love the meadows and the woods, the barns and the family-based rural homes – family-based, I say, because traditional farming needs the whole family to flourish. Those homes are focused on sturdy shelter, safe bedrooms and kitchens ready to feed as many people as need be. When artists place those houses in their landscapes, the viewer feels reassured that somewhere, a family lives in such a steady place.

As artists paint landscapes, they seem to include hope and wishes for the safety of those visions; they include the life within the meadows and forests, a calming country stream, and the passionate rush of a waterfall. They can include the vision of the wildlife inhabiting the scene.

Some fall under the spell of powerful mountains, landscape’s giants where brazen truths are exposed on the peaks, yet secrets are stored with the caves and gullies – some hording risks in dangerous footholds – others guarding treasured works by ancient artists decorating the stone walls, the first reporters to tell who nature was to them.

In an interview with the Citizen, an artist expressed the view that there were too many paintings of “trees and rocks and water,” affirming that there was a crying need to break away from “trees and rocks and water” to dazzle the must-be-bored art patrons with work that is radical – maybe outrageous, challenging and demanding attention with mysteries looming between – what – are those eyeballs?

Sure enough, artists new to the business came to fill the gap, and what they produced was interesting: oddly composed figures whose construction was intended as a political or a social comment.

Art: a tiny word for the ultimate understanding of …the soul? The best of a being, which includes not just us with all our tools and paints, songs and writing. Only recently have we admitted that all creatures on this perfect earth create art.

True story: that birds and squirrels create for the sake of beauty; that more of the other creatures with whom we share this world, than we have acknowledged, use tools of twigs or stone, that they embellish their environment with more than practicality demands.

We, as a species, for hundreds of thousands of years, have been artists; the first thing a toddler might do is pick up something that will make a mark and make that mark, indiscriminately and without question, reflecting the urge.

We love – and don’t – it all because of our very deep need for music, theatre, literature: old stories and new. In art is our compulsion to react, to critique, laugh and cry.

Literature: the written and spoken word still talks about landscapes, for it describes the scene where the story happens. Our fictional feet prefer a platform, however strange the story makes it. Once again, we are invited to join a place that may not be our own, like the farmhouse in the landscape, but the storyteller will bring different details, some for comfort and some to test us and ask – What would you do?

It is the right, indeed the obligation, for artists to reflect the world as they see it. A Caledon artist climbed her neighbouring farmer’s roof to paint an endangered lake and rejoiced when the lake was saved.

An artist did a solo show at the Headwaters Arts Gallery featuring beautiful landscapes to remind us how bad it would be if those precious fields, farmland, and waterways were ploughed over by an unnecessary highway. Pressure is seeing the highway stalled and may never happen.

Art: such a tiny word for being the social engine that it is. The truest histories are painted on ancient walls. They tell us about the creatures that lived in their time and take us right into the most intense moments of waging wars and placing crowns on royal heads, albeit still thousands of years ago.

Once there was writing (3400 BCE in Mesopotamia), did the tools used express the reality of life and thought, beaming a dim light on translating ancient words and forms, interpreting their meaning in the hope of learning more about ourselves?

It is all Stardust, by which I mean magic. That impulse, so intense that the artist’s attention is fully concentrated on the work, in the zone of the work, comes from within and maybe a little – a lot? – from without. Sometimes that drive is sudden and must happen while everything else has to wait. Sometimes it arrives in fragments, mixing, pushing other thoughts to one side but not all the time, just when it’s ready like an eventuality.

For better or for worse, we must create, and there is no imagining a world without creativity in its many coats.

We cannot really explain the Stardust, and that means art really matters.

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