“I want people to see what I see,” Leslie Peebles told me one spring Wednesday morning in her studio on the corner of 2nd and Main St in Gainesville, FL. Leslie is a printmaker who focuses on Florida’s wildlife and wild landscapes. She lived along the banks of the Suwannee River as a child, back when it its springs weren’t choked with algae and their water hadn’t been diverted to agricultural fields and perpetually thirsty cities. But Leslie isn’t one to ruminate on desolation. A self-described gratitude junkie, she only depicts environments that are still comparatively uninfluenced by human activity.

I wanted to see what she saw too, which is why I was there. I’d admired her art for many years. For me, her prints have a way of putting things in a different light. Looking at her prints, I don’t feel as though I’m seeing the environments I’ve become familiar with to the point of overlooking them. It’s the same trees, shrubs, animals, and vivid sky those of us who live here have become accustomed to, but it looks as though everything is illuminated by a strange sun. Numerous words seem to be transposed onto one image, like a hall of mirrors; you see endless permutations of the same reflected thought.

I also had a question I’d been pondering, and Leslie’s preferred medium of art — linocut — seemed to hold a clue that might help me find the answer. I wanted to know what the nature of nothingness was.

That might seem like an odd thing to be wondering, but I’d been reading the book, “Trespassing on Einstein’s Lawn” by Amanda Gefter, which explores the ways in which modern experimental and theoretical physics has changed our understanding of nothingness. I hadn’t really thought much about the question beforehand, but I couldn’t get it out of my head after I’d finished.

Linocut is a style engraving, which seemed like a good way to look at the topic from a different angle. In linocut, an artist creates images by carving out a block of linoleum. In the final piece, an image is created by the absence of its inverse. In other words, you can only discern the image because part of it is missing.

There are parallels here to the way in which our universe of stuff is created. When you inspect nothing closely enough, you find that nothing and something look more and more like opposite poles of the same sphere.

To explain this connection, we’ll start with a look at Leslie’s unique process then take a short jaunt through the nuts and bolts of our universe, coming out the other side with a mile-high view seen through the engravings of local artist Caroline Hurd.

Pictures of the floating world

The art of engraving — whether with linoleum, wood, stone, metal, etc. — has been around for just about as long as modern humans have. But engraving something to create copies of an image is a relatively new technique. The process of leaving an imprint of the engraving on something else, typically cloth or paper, is called printmaking. It likely got its start somewhere in Asia, where it was used to make copies of Buddhist texts. The oldest complete printed text dates from about 700 CE and was discovered in Korea after would-be thieves blew up part of a temple just as old in search of treasure.

Image 1
Albrecht Dürer produced this woodcut without ever having seen a rhinoceros, relying instead on a secondhand account from someone who'd seen a captive rhinoceros in Lisbon.
In Europe, printing was used to produce patterned textiles in the middle ages, and it later became a popular way to stamp playing cards. Later still, the advent of the printing press turned printmaking into a cottage industry, complete with trailblazing artists and a retinue of forgers and counterfeiters. The objects engraved in wood quickly transitioned from letters and blocky outlines to nuanced facsimiles of the world. The German artist Albrecht Dürer arguably sparked the Renaissance of engraving in the early 1500s.

By the 19th century, engraving helped hasten the scientific revolution; biologists hired engravers to illustrate plants and animals, which could be done on wood, copper or other material, and could even be produced — arduously — in color. Woodcuts from 19th century Japan of a style called Ukiyo-e (pictures of the floating world) show just how complex and stunning prints could be.

Hakone, View of the Lake, 1832-1833, by Utagawa Hiroshige.
Leslie first started engraving by chance while teaching middle school art.

“The first year I taught, the high school teacher next door said, ‘I hate linoleum. I never want to do this with my students ever again. Do you want all of these supplies for your middle school students?’ I had next to nothing, so I said yes, and I fell in love with it,” Leslie said.

From then on, linocut became her preferred way to interpret the world through art. After a block has been engraved and printed, she paints the peaks and troughs. There’s one piece, called Everglades Life Triptych, that stands out to me as particularly representative of her style and worldview. She sketched most of the scene while working in the Everglades and added the birds later from photographs she’d taken in the wild.

Leslie Peebles' Everglades Triptych.
It looks like a Medieval tapestry, something that would have been hung up in the hallways of castles or manors as a monument to a hallowed object or event. But instead of a religious relict or a battle, the scene is of a swamp.

The ground isn’t visible, giving a slight sense of vertigo. Unmoored from the bottom floor of the terrestrial world, Leslie shows the canopy as it would be seen by one of its inhabitants. A snake curls around a trunk as it ascends the tree in search of food. A birds-nest fern is fittingly occupied by a yellow warbler. Bromeliads, resurrections ferns, and orchids all vie for space while birds cling to branches like trapeze artists. The transoms and spandrels are overgrown with ivy, and the tree bark shines like stained glass.

There are any number of ways to interpret the piece: A celebration of life; a warning of what might be lost if we don’t prevent the development of Florida’s remaining natural areas; a lamentation for what’s already been lost.

I see it as a response to the collective priorities of our species — or, at least, the subset of humans who currently wield the most power and influence. We venerate saints and worship deities made in our own image, but we take for granted the natural wonders of life that surround us on a daily basis.

The Triptych was Leslie’s year of magical thinking. I wasn’t surprised when she told me she’d gone through a religious bender during a difficult time in her life. She’d been raised in an Episcopalian community, but at a certain point, its tenets no longer seemed to suffice.

“I started experiencing a lot of death in my life. There just wasn’t anything in Christianity that could help me with that.”

She began studying Celtic spirituality, which she later blended with Buddhism, Sufism, and Indigenous spirituality. “I started calling myself an Episcopagan.”

I asked her how this altered her perspective of life and death, the most revered and dreaded of opposites. “Our spirits are eternal,” she told me. “But our physical bodies have had to evolve through all of time, so we’ve been rocks, we’ve been bacteria, we’ve been plants, we’ve been trees, we’ve been fish, we’ve been birds, we’ve been insects. We’ve been everything, and that gives me this really loving connection with everything, because everything is my brother and sister.”

This might seem like a radical idea if you were raised in a western culture, but it’s not unusual in the east. It doesn’t quite qualify as a belief; it’s just a different way of looking at things. You can see yourself as part of the world, or — like Tristan and Isolde — you might look at the entirety of the universe and see yourself staring back.

“Then am I
Myself the world;
Floating in sublime bliss,
Life of love most sacred,
The sweetly conscious
Undeluded wish
Never again to waken.”

“Tristan and Isolde,” Act II, Richard Wagner

This is a wonderful vision. It’s even better when you’re able to personally experience it, which I’d wager that almost everyone has at least once in their life. Our species would undoubtedly have a much better chance of survival, and life would be much less fraught, if we all thought this way. But I suspect that these two concepts — unity and separation — are also just two sides of the same coin. We’re only able to comprehend one or the other because we have both to create contrast, like the plateaus and valleys of an engraving.

This brings us to something fundamental about our universe and the way we perceive it. Humans have pondered the nature of substance and absence for a very long time, but things have gotten particularly interesting over the last century with the development of the theory of general relativity and quantum mechanics. What exactly is something — matter and energy — and how does it differ from nothing?

Part 2 --> (available January 1, 2025)