Healing Landscapes

Places of special beauty, grandeur, and abundance bring us closer to nature's healing powers. However, the healing touch of nature can also be found in our own backyards. From the minute to the grandiose, nature's beauty can lift, soothe, and strengthen everyone who is willing to take a moment to watch and listen. It was in the Big Thicket of East Texas and the Big Bend of far West Texas where artist Jeanne Norsworthy began to appreciate these special gifts. She responded by creating drawings and paintings that now transmit the power of these extraordinary sites to those who view her pictures and read her thought-provoking descriptions. In turn, as Norsworthy wrote, those experiences may encourage us to reach out to heal the nature that our civilization has scarred and endangered.

In this graceful and grace-filled book, Norsworthy shares her experiences with and observations of nature and people found in the Big Thicket and the Big Bend. Whether painting the life and death of a single magnolia blossom or the clear, magnifying vistas of mountain and desert, she worked with an inner voice that gave special depth and meaning to her work.

About 1990, Norsworthy was diagnosed with breast cancer and began medical treatment. It was a turning point in her art as well as her life, and thereafter she tried to describe in her work the healing that a connection to nature, and an ear for nature's half-hidden messages, can give. Her painting, always dependent on what she called "the dreamlike state," became even more allegorical in interpreting the relationship of the natural and the emotional worlds, the time "just before sleep or waking invaluable for visualizing a painting."

Norsworthy's tender and evocative art offers us an appreciation of the natural worlds of Texas' Big Thicket and Big Bend and an invitation to let nature in to help us heal.