Welcome

 

This website, Nature's Rights, is a  literary work, a  book of poetry and paintings, arranged in a gallery format.  It is an extended and patient meditation on the beauty of nature and nature's rights.

 I have been making it for the last six years. It is not something that one can read in a day. It is best viewed as it was made: as you would take time with a friend or a companion animal that lives in your house. Taking time and caring is the way of nature and of poetry, as it is the way of good relationships with other people. This book invites you into such a relationship. I invite you into the intimacies of a world worth living in, into the mentality that nature everywhere exhibits so artfully and with such intelligent and expressive simplicity.
      
 The internet is an disembodied, solipsistic, human-centered environment, essentially anti-natural, and thus my site is in contradiction to the medium that carries it. There is nothing here of the fugitive info-commercialism encouraged by the form of the internet. Patience and sensitivity are  needed to view this site, just as these qualities are needed for the sympathetic understanding of nature. This site asks you to heal the split between your mind and nature, come out of the abstract realm of ideas and ideology and rejoin the actual world.
    
 Nature's Rights is composed of poems, paintings and essays,  and is best viewed and read in sequence. Each page is self contained, but nevertheless echoes other pages. The Introduction and the beginning page called Heroes Wetland are both overviews of the entire website and introduce many of the major themes and concerns of the whole website. Subsequent pages develop aspects of these concerns in much more detail. But if the viewer's interest is in the paintings alone it does not matter if the order of the pages is followed.

This site is still in process of making and some pages are not finished or will be added in time.

Please select below to begin viewing this site.

Catalogue of Selected Paintings in the Nature's Rights Book

     Introduction

Part 1: Between Science and Feeling: Studies in Wonder

Nature's Rights

                    Poem "Nature's Rights" and paintings
short essay, "What is Nature's Rights?"

The Origin and Question of the Eyes
poem and essay with paintings

Sun and Sunlight
Poem "Sun and Sunlight" -- (a little history of light and color)

Water, Birds and Landscapes I

                    Beginning of Poem "Ode to Water" and paintings

Water, Birds and Landscapes II

                     End of Poem "Ode to Water" and paintings

Wildflowers

                    Poem: "The Wildflower Rainbow" and paintings

Flying

             poem and paintings

Bird Song

                   Poem "Bird Song and Knowledge" (a meditation in 10 poems with Paintings)

         Essay: "Brief History of Some North American Mammals"  
              ( unfinished)

Part 2: SONGS OF THE NIGHT

Night, Moonlight and Stars

                  Poem "Ode to Moonlight" and  Paintings

Owls I

         Story about Owls and paintings of Owls

Owls II

                    Poem "Ode to Owls" and paintings of Owls

Snow Geese

                    Poem: "Snow Geese" and paintings

Part 3: HEROES WETLAND

                             Deer I have loved.  Poem and paintings  
                   

                            Poem "Coats of Liquid Light" and paintings of geese

                            Poem "Adding to Darwin" and paintings of geese

                "Observations on the  Geese Community at Heroes     Wetland" and paintings

                    Poem "Brief Picture of a Goldfinch's Life" and paintings

Woodpeckers

                    this page in process

Redbirds

                    Paintings

Part 4: HOME

                    Essay and Painting

Portrait of a Mother
Elegy for Mom and other poems

A Few other Portraits
 

Other Poems About Animals and Place
 

Click Here for Other works by Mark Koslow   
(Friend's Area, by permission only)
  

(My Daughter and me and other parents and babies at Heroes)

All images. writings and poems on this site ©Mark Koslow
Reproduction thereof forbidden without written permission from the artist.

This is a personal website: a literary work of art and fiction in progress, and no page on it is currently definitive.
Copyright © 2002-08 Mark Koslow. All Rights Reserved.