BRADLEY TePASKE, PhD
The wellspring of my life as an artist has two streams: a boundless fascination with the natural world and an innate yearning for religious experience. Always a wanna-be field biologist, my artistic gift pointed more to studio arts than labor field station. Diligent efforts in intaglio printmaking and art history at the University of Iowa in the late Vietnam era produced my best early work and oriented my sense of history. But this culminated in a transformational crises that detonated my one-sided aesthetic purview (to the tune of Berlioz’ Symphony Fantastique) while simultaneously birthing a depth psychological worldview that sent me to the clinical frontline as a Psychiatric Assistant in Minneapolis, to the C.G. Jung Institute Zurich and on through 40 years as a Jungian analyst, religious historian, graphic artist and writer.
All Things Great and Humboldt, 2020
(Collage, 46.5” x 25”)
This playful cabinet of natural and alchemical curiosities harkens back to an age of battling academic faculties, elite scientific fraternities, passionate explorers and busy museum curators, all captivated by the mystery of Morphogenesis, the origin, evolution and specificity of natural forms. Originally titled “All Things Darwinian and Sacred” in order to confound religionists and rationalists alike, the work celebrates the anima telluris, the specific power of Earth to produce mineral crystals, microbes, nucleated cells and living bodies in such diversity and abundance independent of human ratiocinations. From the overarching Sun with its odd ‘serpentry’ the displays descends to the Orphic light bringer, Phanes (center) and a lackadaisical Mephisto jester in scarlet attire. Magnified to the right a Covid-19 virus likewise appears tasseled in red. It is rightly placed above the famous Naturgemålde of naturalist, Alexander von Humboldt (1769-1859) to whom contemporary ecological understanding is profoundly indebted (as was Darwin). The devilish pandemic, as collective as it is intimate, calls us to seek compassion in suffering, insight in solitude, and to an unequivocal affirmation of both human lives and the creative arts. The Cabinet of Curiosity, the Given Earth and your own Natural History Museum of memory and imagination are open twenty-four seven. No masks required!