Bearing Witness, Vol 1: March 24-27, 2025

$75.00

Bearing Witness is the title I chose for a project I began at the beginning of Trump’s second term in office. I kept a field-notes style notebook, in which I recorded what I saw in the natural world around me as well as monitoring the news of our democracy under attack. It was both healing and disturbing to keep up this practice daily, but it was my way of bearing witness to the fragility and beauty of both nature and our political reality.

Often, I found it difficult to choose which bits of the bountiful natural world I wanted to bring attention to in any given period. It was even more difficult to choose which bits of the news to highlight. The juxtaposition is meant to be jarring and thought-provoking.

Each page is packed with information, including the common and Latin names of each species, the date I saw it, and sometimes some notes on the location where I saw it. On the top right are the coordinates of where I was during the period covered; the top left indicates the dates covered, and these vary in length. Also included on each page is the date, source , and authors of the news clips I’ve included.

I followed a few of my own “rules.” I had to “see” or “hear” a species to include it. Wherever possible, I used my own photographs as references for the drawings, but I sometimes had to resort to finding reference images on-line. For the most part, these pages bear witness to the flora and fauna of Albemarle County, Virginia, but I also travelled to Wisconsin and to the UK during the past year. Though the flora and fauna from those pages reflect what I saw in those locations, the news bits stayed focused on what was going in in the U.S. I may have made a few errors in species identification, and for that I apologize.

11” x 14” giclee print, signed and numbered in an edition of 50, on archival paper.

March 24-27, 2025, depicts a pileated woodpecker, a field mouse, common periwinkle, tiny bluet, cut-leaf toothwort, bloodroot

Bearing Witness is the title I chose for a project I began at the beginning of Trump’s second term in office. I kept a field-notes style notebook, in which I recorded what I saw in the natural world around me as well as monitoring the news of our democracy under attack. It was both healing and disturbing to keep up this practice daily, but it was my way of bearing witness to the fragility and beauty of both nature and our political reality.

Often, I found it difficult to choose which bits of the bountiful natural world I wanted to bring attention to in any given period. It was even more difficult to choose which bits of the news to highlight. The juxtaposition is meant to be jarring and thought-provoking.

Each page is packed with information, including the common and Latin names of each species, the date I saw it, and sometimes some notes on the location where I saw it. On the top right are the coordinates of where I was during the period covered; the top left indicates the dates covered, and these vary in length. Also included on each page is the date, source , and authors of the news clips I’ve included.

I followed a few of my own “rules.” I had to “see” or “hear” a species to include it. Wherever possible, I used my own photographs as references for the drawings, but I sometimes had to resort to finding reference images on-line. For the most part, these pages bear witness to the flora and fauna of Albemarle County, Virginia, but I also travelled to Wisconsin and to the UK during the past year. Though the flora and fauna from those pages reflect what I saw in those locations, the news bits stayed focused on what was going in in the U.S. I may have made a few errors in species identification, and for that I apologize.

11” x 14” giclee print, signed and numbered in an edition of 50, on archival paper.

March 24-27, 2025, depicts a pileated woodpecker, a field mouse, common periwinkle, tiny bluet, cut-leaf toothwort, bloodroot

At the onset of 2019 I embarked on a project that I ended up calling Field Notes From a Lost Year. Each week (or so) I sketched botanical specimens from life in pen and watercolor. I identified each specimen by both common and Latin names, noted the weather on the day I sketched, and added interesting notations about the plant’s native or invasive status, whether it was poisonous, etc.

Sometimes I added sketches of birds, insects or mammals I had seen that week. Each page notes the longitude and latitude where the sketch subjects were found (usually Albemarle County, Virginia, but sometimes Hancock and Milwaukee, Wisconsin, a highway in Ohio, the Chicago Botanic Gardens, or Northampton, Massachusetts). Importantly, in addition to the sketches, I included short quotations from the week’s climate-related news from a wide variety of sources. I hoped that juxtaposing my intense meditative sketches with mostly grim, but sometimes hopeful news about climate change would make it easier, and more poignant to recognize the gorgeous diversity of what we could lose if action isn’t taken immediately.

The original sketches are gathered in a spiral bound Bee Paper notebook; my son forbids me to break up the notebook and sell the originals. For that reason, I’ve made limited edition giclée prints on archival, acid-free bamboo paper. The photography and printing was done at Stubblefield Photo Lab in Charlottesville, VA. All images are copyright 2020 by Suzanne Crane–please do not reproduce without permission. The images on the website each have a small watermark on them to discourage copying.