Stefanie Scarlett      The Journal Gazette

When Audrey Riley wandered around the Vandolah Nature Preserve, she found plenty of organized chaos. Naturally.

A tree growing along a creek caught her eye. Seeds and pollen had accumulated in the water below to create “so many awesome shades of green, even fluorescent. As I looked closer, it was infinite. There were smaller particles in among the big ones,” she says.

Inspired by that image, the Fort Wayne artist created a mixed media piece to reflect the idea of metaphorically getting lost in nature. Her layers of paint chips and yardstick pieces swirl together in a whirlpool effect. The title is “And,” because “everything in nature is additive” and those three letters are found in both “land” and “Vandolah.”

It is one of 20 pieces in the new exhibit, “ARTology: The Intersection of Art and Nature,” which opens today at the Honeywell Center's Clark Gallery in Wabash.

The show, which celebrates the 50th anniversary of ACRES Inc., will travel to venues around northeast Indiana before arriving at the Fort Wayne Museum of Art in August.

It is a joint project of ACRES and the museum, in which each artist was asked to highlight an ACRES Land Trust preserve and show the relationship between art and nature in a tangible way.

“We often lead hikes (and) describe our properties through the scientific aspects of the preserves: dendrology, geology, wildlife biology, herpetology, all the ‘-ologies,' ” ACRES executive director Jason Kissel says.

“However, most visitors simply appreciate the landscapes, the beauty, the pristine nature of the preserves. … So the title ‘ARTology' was an attempt to describe what the show really is, using art to describe a scientifically significant property,” he says.

Several of the participating artists spoke with The Journal Gazette about their experience.

This Angola woman decided to take the mission literally. After hiking in Steuben County's Woodland Bog Nature Preserve, she scraped the dirt (“a lush woodland soil”) off her shoes and used it in her ceramic bowls. Some of the soil was forged into shiny bits during the firing process.

Her first trip to the bog “was nothing like I'd ever seen up in this county before. … There were all kinds of fungus and mushrooms, a lot of oak. The neatest thing was a whole mass of different kinds of ferns,” she says. She also pressed fern leaves onto the wet clay bowls to make impressions.

Henning hiked a few preserves before selecting Woodland Bog.

“This one was just ‘Wow.' A little jewel,” she says, adding that she found the ground “festooned with little shards of pottery sticking out” from its days as a likely dump site way back when.

When sunlight filtered through tall trees to perfectly illuminate Robb Hidden Canyon Nature Preserve one lovely fall afternoon, painter Justice-Schaab was there.

“It was so beautiful; everything just seemed to sparkle. There were nice little warm spots; it was just wonderful. (And) the shadows were really great for me,” the Waterloo artist says.

She took photographs and made some sketches on site in the Steuben County preserve, then finished the painting in her studio. Painting “en plein air” presents plenty of challenges, she says, including light variations, bugs and the weather.

“You're just out in it. You're breathing it, you're feeling it. … You experience ‘The Full Monty' – you get it all,” Justice-Schaab says, laughing.

Back when he was in high school, photographer Perfect and friends used to wander around the land that is now Popp Nature Preserve. He's been going back regularly over the years for ACRES events.

“It's a place that I love, a place I go to relax,” he says.

Last fall, he ventured in to find the perfect photo op: a branch of red berries. The late-afternoon setting “just had a nice feeling. It was very soft and subtle; it was the mood of the day,” he says.

He digitally enhanced it “to bring in another dimension,” creating an abstract called “Alive and Well,” which will be displayed as a triptych.

Perfect has another connection to ACRES, since he once lived near the late Jane and Tom Dustin, who founded the organization in 1960. And his son, Shane, currently works for ACRES.

Her oil landscape was inspired by a photograph that a friend, Jack Stark, took before he sold land to ACRES a few years ago.

It shows a tree in Stark Nature Preserve leaning over the Pigeon River.

“I loved that photo. I was taken with that particular image. Then I thought it needed geese,” she says.

So she painted in two Canada geese paddling along the river. Smith has dubbed them “Jack” and “Cherie” in honor of Stark and his wife.

The painting is called “Partners for Life,” honoring the pair in the painting and the philosophy that protecting nature should be a lifelong goal for all of us.

The LaGrange County preserve is totally forested, Stark says, and features an old oxbow pond. The Pigeon River also is one of the state's best for canoeing.

“It is one of the few clean, pristine rivers in Indiana. It is crystal clear,” Stark says.

She fell in love with Dygert Nature Preserve when she saw it for the first time last year. The result of her visit: a 30-by-40 inch oil painting of a group of trees in the Whitley County preserve. (She believes the main one is a shagbark hickory).

“I wanted it to be big and close up, just to get a feeling of how small you can feel out under the trees,” she says.

“Painting outside, from life, is just a whole different experience. You gain a big appreciation for nature, for the whole experience. I can remember every smell, every sight,” she says.

When she was a girl, her family went camping every summer weekend. Her grandfather owned a plot of woods and tried to teach her about the trees.

So she titled her “ARTology” painting “Stand With Me,” calling it “my statement about us standing together to preserve those places.”

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