International Artist’s Day: Nature Is Your Canvas

October 25th is International Artist’s Day, and if you know me, you know how much I love art. To celebrate the creative souls who brighten our lives with their artistic magic, I want to highlight an artist I absolutely love: Andy Goldsworthy. 

Andy is an English artist, environmentalist, photographer, and sculptor who creates art with natural elements, including land art and site-specific sculptures in urban and countryside settings. He uses leaves, petals, sticks, mud, icicles, snow, pinecones, thorns, twigs, stones, and everything in between. If it exists in nature, Andy can use it to emphasize our Earth’s innate beauty. 

The best part? His art truly is environmentally friendly. It disintegrates over time! That’s why he snaps a photo of it before it fades back into nature. He also refuses to interfere with natural processes, instead opting to magnify what already exists via “minimal intervention.” 

“I am reluctant to carve into or break off solid living rock…I feel a difference between large, deep-rooted stones and the debris lying at the foot of a cliff, pebbles on a beach… These are loose and unsettled, as if on a journey, and I can work with them in ways I couldn’t with a long resting stone,” he said in Techne and Phusis: Wilderness and the Aesthetics of the Trace of Andy Goldsworthy (written in 2005). 

As a nature lover myself, my work is constantly fueled by our gorgeous planet. My love for Andy’s creations hits that intersection between nature and art and how we reside in a living, breathing canvas. I also love that he isn’t creating art to line his pockets. He’s not doing it for fame or for folks to view his work in a museum. He’s making a statement about our home. We should care for it like the expensive artwork we hang on our walls. 

There’s something beautifully simplistic about Andy’s art just existing in nature. Seriously, if I ever stumbled upon one of his creations while hiking, I might drop dead. I admire his multipurpose work and the intentionality behind it. We need more artists like him.