Betsy Jaeger: Environmental Art from Appalachia
A lonely goldfinch stands out against the drab and lifeless landscape of logging and strip mining on the road where I live.
Featured Content
Portraits of my Enigmatic Brother
My brother, John, was born in 1958, four years after me. It was another year before he was diagnosed with Down Syndrome and not until he was an adult that autism was also diagnosed. As a child, I just accepted his DS as a given.
People with autism do not like to be touched. It creates sensory overload. My autistic brother, the youngest in a family of eight affectionate people, had to establish his boundaries. His hugs were straight-armed and at some remove. He resisted wearing shoes or being covered with a blanket. Being non-verbal, he couldn’t tell us what it felt like.
Temple Grandin, an autistic woman with a PhD in animal behavior, said she thought in images and felt a strong affinity for other animals' response to visual stimuli, a necessary survival skill . I don’t know how John thought, or how visual he was, but living with him may have showed me another way of looking at the world.
With each passing year of living in a rural landscape and in close proximity to birds and wildlife, I grow more convinced that other species think about things and feel emotions, although maybe not the same way humans do. Why not? We all share the same DNA. Humans are just one part of a much bigger whole and people with autism may have a much stronger bond with the natural world. Trying to understand my brother’s boundaries, seeking comparison in the natural world, has been the basis of my recent paintings.
With these thoughts in mind, I painted a series of portraits of John based on photos taken of him over the years. He died of old age at 53. People with DS age faster than others. I never had a conversation with him and often wonder how he perceived the world around him. For me, his mystery overlaps the mystery of the natural world.
Double portrait of my brother and me
Recent Work
INSIDE-OUTSIDE, 24” x 18," oil paint on wood panel
Based on a family photo, this image of John and me shows his deer-in-the-headlights expression, which is much closer to what is beyond the window frame - the deer outside. The tree trunk shows through his partly transparent body, connecting him to the ghostly junco on the branch and the deer trapped behind the branches.
JULY FOURTH: 30” x 25” x 1.5”, oil paint on wood panel
My brother is waving a flag while watching a July Fourth parade as the scene dissolves into another symbol of America. But these eagles, occupying separate panels, are no mere symbols. Like my brother, they have their own world with no need of ours.
PASSAGE THROUGH DARKNESS: (triptych), 18" x 24" (each section) oil paint and rag paper on canvas
Cutout silhouettes of crows underlie portraits of my brother as he looks toward the sunset and the ambiguities of how to navigate a world where he didn’t fit.
VISITATION, 18” x 24”, oil paint and rag paper on wood panel
The nursing home where my brother lived was originally run by the Franciscan Brothers. When they no longer had enough members to run the facility, the State of Illinois took over. The changeover and the use of drugs to control behavior had a negative impact on my brother. Did he have inner help?
TWO BEARS: 30” x 25” x 1.5”, oil paint on wood panels
My sister, who straddles the two worlds of nursing home and nature, hands a stuffed teddy bear to John. The dark door frame behind him also connects him to the world of the real bear.
LION'S CAGE: 18" x 24", oil paint on wood panel
People with Down Syndrome are generally very affectionate. But the addition of autism makes sensory experiences unpleasant. A photo taken during a family picnic at his nursing home is juxtaposed with a caged lion, whose eyes share the same lost look as those of my brother. Likely they both felt trapped in their respective situations.
Show More
Background to the Work
There has always been coal removal in my neighborhood of Sugar Grove, west of Morgantown, West Virginia. In the old days most houses near an exposed coal seam would dig their own coal for personal use from what was called a kitchen or punch mine. Some of these portals are still visible.
As machinery became more powerful, strip mining, or the removal of ground to expose a large swath of a coal seam, became possible. When we built a house in Sugar Grove in 1978, there were a few small strip mines around. Slowly they became bigger and the blasts to remove the ‘overburden’ more powerful. Interesting that the very ground on which people lived was described as a burden.
Our neighbors were mostly farmers who kept cows to breed calves to send to feedlots. We never kept animals ourselves but were glad to let a neighbor take hay off our pasture for his cows. Before 2007, a farmer named John Bucy, who refused to sell his coal seam to stripping companies, died and his sons who lived far away sold the land to a local lawyer, who soon had it stripped. The first Bucy mine, a most inappropriate name, began in February of 2007 on Sugar Grove Road.
I have walked Sugar Grove Road most days since 2003 and as the small hill farms gave way to strip mines, I carried my camera to document the changes. In 2010, a big power line was routed through our neighborhood using eminent domain. People forced to have the big pylons on their land decided to sell out to stripping companies as well. Soon, Bucy #2 Mine (S-2008-09) was underway, whose progress along Sugar Grove Road I photographed daily.
In 2011 we received a letter from the mining company asking us to come see them to ‘discuss business’. That was a dark day indeed because it meant neighbors close to us had already agreed to a stripping contract. We ignored the letter. The permit process for Bucy #3 Mine (S-2002-12) moved forward, despite our attempts to stop the permit. As West Virginia gets much of its revenue from coal severance taxes, the WV Department of Environmental Protection rarely turns down a permit application. So our attempts to stop another strip mine in a farming area went nowhere.
In August of 2012, the strip mine, whose boundary would come up to our fence line, got underway. We bought a movie camera to document the blasts, dust and noise from the heavy machinery that often began at 5 am and went on until midnight. I collected a lot of images. Apparently all the residents of the area just had to tolerate the cracked walls, noise and dust so that a handful of people could make money.
In May of 2014, the stripping company declared bankruptcy, having made their money, and skipped out on their debts to their employees and subcontractors. The insufficient bond money posted to cover the reclamation was forfeited and the state of WV is left to clean up the abandoned mines. But West Virginia has little money so reclamation may never happen. See a 3-minute video HERE showing the impact on our streams of the abandoned mines seven years later.
Much of the art work presented here grew from the photos I took of the changes in my neighborhood. Unlike words, images are understandable by everyone across time, space and culture, which is why we can look at Paleolithic cave paintings and know the ‘what’, if not the ‘why’. Looking for poetic meaning in my domestic space is another reason to make the images. But my images are also aimed at people of the future, to apologize for our collective squandering and destruction of their world.
The artwork presented here is about a particular time and place: the peripheral areas of Morgantown, West Virginia in the early 21st Century, a period of significant change from coal as king to coal as history. It will not be easy for the state to create a new revenue source and especially a new identity. But the state mascot is a mountaineer, not a coal miner, so perhaps we should return to the original mountain identity but with a 21st Century awareness.
My artwork is intimate and domestic. I think of it as a diary of the time I have lived here - a small sliver of the long history of this corner of Appalachia. It is set against the backdrop of the universe as seen in the many starry skies in my paintings.
Learn More
Following is my 11-minute video to show the impact of a strip mine on our neighborhood. Blasting, noise and dust were the beginning. Acid mine drainage is the lasting result.