Last week, the artist Wyland dedicated a behemoth mural he had painted on the brick backside of a very tall, quite wide hotel on North Michigan Avenue.
A pod of humpback whales, big as life, now swim up and down the rear of the Hotel Intercontinental, a building that once tethered blimps to its gilded dome.
The guy should have painted lake trout.
Lake trout–king of the Great Lakes carnivores, eagle of the sweetwater seas–no longer can breed successfully in Lake Michigan. And nobody knows why.
Wouldn’t that have been a powerful environmental message, and one with local relevance? See this magnificent fish! the painting would have screamed.
We are doing something to the water that will wipe it out!
“I paint everything life-size,” Wyland said in an interview. “So that would have been a very small mural, maybe 2 feet by 3 feet.”
OK, paint them bigger. You’re an artist, use your imagination.
The point is, we didn’t need the whales. In the same way that whales are somewhat cliche in the world of art, they are also a bit worn out in the world of conservation.
Not just because the phrase “save the whales” can get a laugh. But because scientists are trying to move beyond just saving the beautiful, the furry and the doe-eyed from the buzz saw of extinction.
“Damn the charismatic megafauna, anyway,” they grumble.
While not criticizing Wyland and his very big painting, Sandi Stein, a spokeswoman for the environmental group Chicago Wilderness, said she thought sandhill cranes would have made a dandy mural, announcing to people that the big bird’s numbers are rebounding modestly in Illinois.
“Can you imagine a mural with huge sandhill cranes flying through it?” she said. “It would have been gorgeous.
“We had bison and mountain lions and all kinds of things here, that are now gone, that would have made a nice mural.”
James Landing, an environmental geography professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago, suggested that the next hotel with a bare backside might consider a painting of jaegers.
“For birders, one of the most exciting incidents in their lives is standing on the shore of Lake Michigan and seeing the migration of jaegers,” Landing said.
“A picture of jaegers would be my choice,” Landing said.
Put jaegers on the list, then.
(Oh, by the way, a jaeger is an arctic bird that chases other birds until they get so frightened and tired that they drop their food and the jaeger picks it up and eats it. A hotel wanting to sport nature’s grandeur should be willing to accept its violence, no?)
How about a big painting of a Higgins eye mussel, a clamlike creature hiding from extinction in the muck of the Mississippi River?
Or maybe a big bug: The Hines emerald dragonfly flits about in only a few places on the globe, including suburban Chicago.
The black-crowned night heron would make a curmudgeonly, but charming, portrait, as it is always posed with its head down as if it were grumpy over being on the state endangered species list.
The smooth green snake, hardly bigger than an earthworm but so opulent in its coloring, deserves at least a wall–it used to have a whole state filled with the prairie where it lived.
Alas, there will be no wall for the little snake, for the mollusk or for the bug. No walls, either, for any other uncharismatic microfauna.
But we have whales, their dead eyes cast toward Lake Michigan.
