Mushrooms emerging from the forest floor providing nourishment for our bodies and our psyches—and, sometimes, bringing death—are the fruiting structures of fungi whose vast root systems called mycelia can inhabit nearly 4 square miles of turf as the fungus Armillaria ostoyae does in Oregon’s Blue Mountains. Not only is it large, it is estimated to be over 2,400 years old.

Trees, through photosynthesis, produce sugars and fats that the fungi absorb into their mycelium which, in turn, help the trees and other plants absorb water and nutrients from the soil far away from their root systems. They also form a huge network of communication among the forest flora.

The unseen physical connections in the natural world parallel its non-physical connections. The 13th-century priest and theologian, Thomas Aquinas, wrote about the preternatural. For his 2022 exhibition, Preternatural, at the Cincinnati Museum Center, Michael Scott wrote, “Somewhere between the mundane and the miraculous, exists the preternatural. That is what I have tried to paint with my sojourns to these wild places in America that offer us a glimpse of why we need to protect certain lands.

“Aquinas coined the word,” he observes. “The more I looked into it, I could explain it this way; The natural is what we exist in normally every day. You look out, and there’s the natural world. Then, there’s the supernatural, which is like an idea that’s very hard to prove, but it does exist. Aquinas was more interested in what happens in the moments in your life when you’re looking at something which is natural, but experience something beyond. If you go into the natural world and camp out, you may not get it the first day. You may not get it the second day, but if you’re experiencing the land, it will come and it will be there for you. It never fails—that moment of transcendence when it is no longer a literal experience.”

He explains, “The landscape has always offered me an invitation to enter the realm of the preternatural—a world of stillness, reflection, and phenomena far removed from the mundane activities of daily life. While I engage in this conversation with nature, logic and reason are often suspended. Indeed, the cold facts of the physical world could not be more dissimilar to the pure sensations derived from our wild places. These elements are what I instinctively and explicitly seek as a painter, not to restrict the landscape to a simple imitation but to participate in a conversation with the unknown.

“When I was up in Canada painting a landscape, the full moon was rising in front of me as the sun was setting behind me. It really shook me up. It was one of the coolest moments I’ve experienced in a long time.”

The preternatural sometimes manifests in synchronicities that shake the soul and remove the barriers between us and the other. Painting an image of a stag for his upcoming summer exhibition at Evoke he walked over to look out the glass doors opening onto the vast landscape surround his home and studio, “And there was a stag! We looked at each other and then he walked down and sat under a juniper and was just as peaceful as anything.” The gaze of the stag in his painting is now more communicative than it might have been before their meeting and the slight tilt of his head suggests a sympatico, a shared relationship of being.

Beneath the forest floor are the mycelia, perfectly performing their role. Beneath the surface of Michael’s painting Religion Meets Science, lies an image that didn’t perform its role. As is his wont, he meticulously rendered a trumpeter swan, once nearly extinct in the Yellowstone region.

“It’s a beautiful bird,” he comments. “It’s very majestic in its own right, but it’s been used in narratives for centuries. It was too much of a naturalist painting. Although I rendered it to the hilt, it really didn’t say anything.”

The pure white swan is burned in Religion Meets Science, its blackened wings spread out as if on a cross but more closely recalling the wings on the caduceus, the symbol of medicine with its staff entwined with snakes derived from the staff of the Greek god Hermes.

The elements of earth, air, fire and water are ever present themes in Michael’s paintings.

“As I was creating this body of work,” he says,” it migrated to the elements. Today, we’re dealing with floods, we're dealing with tornadoes and hurricanes, we're dealing with erupting volcanoes, wildfires and landslides. So, all four of the elements are integral in what I'm painting. I have been painting fire paintings for quite a long time, partly because I find fire to be so mysterious. It is not only something that destroys, but it is also something that renews.”

For thousands of years, Native people have practiced cultural burning, a spiritual and practical method of land management. The burns encourage biodiversity, new growth and a more resilient landscape.

Perhaps my most favorite of Michael’s fire paintings, although there are many, is The Witness. Several years ago I wrote:

“In The Witness, the four elements interweave, smoke and mist combining in a liminal state like the place between waking and sleeping, visible and not visible, real and unreal, present and past. A fire burns from among ferns and lichen-covered rocks. The wolf becomes revealed and sees what else is revealed. Michael notes that the wolf ‘characterizes a symbol of guardianship and ritual.’ Among Native peoples the wolf is often a spiritual guide.

“In this painting the wolf appears to observe Earth in a primeval state before mankind or, perhaps, after. Despite our efforts to right our wrongs, cutting down on carbon emissions, reintroducing bison and wolves to their historical habitats we, as a species, may not survive. Michael offers hope as well as warnings in his paintings and that the non-material may be our destiny.

“’The “gray zone” of the smoke and fog crosses all belief systems and is a state between reality and unreality,’ he says. ‘It is both real and imagined at the same time as it confronts the viewer in both physical form and sprit. The smoke symbolizes the transition of matter into sprit and sends signals that represent the material manifestation of the soul’s journey.’”

The observing wolf reminds me of a story Northwest Native elders told the children when they asked what they should do if they got lost. David Wagoner interpreted it in his poem Lost:

Stand still. The trees ahead and bushes beside you
Are not lost. Wherever you are is called Here,
And you must treat it as a powerful stranger,
Must ask permission to know it and be known.
The forest breathes. Listen. It answers,
I have made this place around you.
If you leave it, you may come back again, saying Here.
No two trees are the same to Raven.
No two branches are the same to Wren.
If what a tree or a bush does is lost on you,
You are surely lost. Stand still. The forest knows
Where you are. You must let it find you.