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Maybe it’s just me, but the idea of crawling along the bark of a tree and then, somehow penetrating to the tree’s interior is enticing, even thrilling. I would find myself exploring an alternate landscape, completely strange and yet in some respects peculiarly familiar. Would I be a tiny ant-sized being gazing upon monumentally scaled ridges, peaks and valleys busily pushing their way through space, or would I be a giant looking, as if through a microscope, at pulsing veins of energy in constant motion? I imagine it might be an unlikely combination of the two perspectives. My tree fantasy returns me to elementary school scien
ce class and to words like cambium, xylem (up) and phloem (down), and then pitches me forward into a horror movie in which the heroic trees are striving madly to suck carbon from the atmosphere as fast as the humans and their infernal machines can spew it out.
For me, trees are so compelling at the moment because when it comes to the various icons of nature-- oceans, mountains, sky, etc. --they are the one with which we can most easily identify. More even than the animals, the trees are the other vertical standing perpendicular to the ground plane-- it’s us and them. The international symbol for “tree” and the one for “man” are easy to confuse.
I’m arranging many of my new paintings in series that form a line across the wall; some others are single paintings severely horizontal in format. These groupings and individual long pictures form their own horizon lines on the wall rather than in the painting. The aim is to suggest an alternative landscape into which the viewer is drawn right up into, so that it fills one’s peripheral vision. This approach to the presentation of nature presses against the conventions of landscape painting in which nature is neatly ordered around a horizon line located in the distance of the pictorial space, approached by following an illusionistic path leading through a foreground to the middle distance and beyond.
This serial framework suggests the unfolding of a story. In this story, there is no single way to look at nature. There’s this vantage point, and then there’s that one, as you move across the visual plane. The ability to consider nature in this way is probably the gift of photography. Photography introduced the idea of multiple perspectives and represented a deep shift from what the painted landscape had offered previously. In my work, the multiplying viewpoints remind us how nature defies a static reading or stable perspective. It’s not just we animals that are animate; we are just a part of the story. Plants are another, and they are agents of change too.
No one view of nature prevails because nature itself- not just the observer- is constantly changing. Living species are engaged in a continuous process of metabolizing and reproduction, doing what it takes to keep going. The minerals and gases are changing too. While we humans might think everything revolves around our own life cycles, we are just one player in nature going about its business. The patterns found in nature –whether wood grain or ripples in sand or striated rock formations-- dramatize this constant activity, a pushing and pulling that occurs at every scale of time— with the tides in the ripples on the beach, with the earth’s unpredictable jolts to it’s crust, with the years in the grain of wood.
It’s surprising to me that while painting what I imagine to be going on inside the tree, I find all kinds of patterns or forms I’ve observed elsewhere in the natural world. I am reminded of things like stone outcroppings, sand dunes, shells, water, human body parts, and feathers. And then there are the echoing graphic patterns found in our various depictions of natural phenomena, such as the isobars on weather maps, topographical elevations and ocean floor charts. I’m not sure why there are all these repetitions, but it’s interesting to locate them and consider the reasons why evolutionary forces seem to share common patterns across the spectrum of nature.
Some of the paintings offer a view of wood that would be impossible to obtain were it not for the work of a saw or some other human tool. Wood is in my everyday life everywhere I look. There it is under my feet (floorboards); now I’m sitting on it (chair); it’s in my hand as I work all day (paintbrush handle); there are the trees planted in a line down my street to shade the sidewalks (elms); and now it rests on my chest before I drop off to sleep (book). Wood and human culture rub up against one another in an almost constant and unavoidable dance.
But even standing uncut or lying fallen on the forest floor, the trees play an ever-present role as symbols of our shifting cultural values and concerns, a storehouse of particularly rich metaphors. They embody human views of nature that range all the way from the romantic and sublime to the apocalyptic. Trees have served variously as symbols of history and continuity, of precariousness and peril, of culture and political stability, and of wilderness. Trees are also seen as benevolent timekeepers, benign habitats for all manner of creatures, respirators, healers of human ecological harm, and by some, as symbols of god’s handiwork.
I experience nature as a roiling, forceful energy that is extraordinary and yet also an ordinary part of everyday life. Is that because I somehow impose my own psychological state on what I observe every time I walk out my door? Lots of people assume that nature is something found only in wilderness parks, unchanging and saved for vacation days. In any case, during these times of mounting worries about the degradation of our local landscapes, an intimate engagement with nature, a recognition of the active part it plays in our daily experience, seems particularly urgent today. Don’t we need to come to an understanding about how to live in a truly reciprocal relationship with other species— if only for the self-interested reason of our own survival?
So, right now, I’m looking to the trees for some information. However I look at these prominent figures in our landscape I cannot help but feel how important they are. Trees. Whether majestic or lowly, I sense their complicated inner lives. The drama of how they chart their course through space, the secrecy of their hollows and fissures, the intricate designs of their growth patterns, and the magic of their biochemistry—all tell a compelling story. Maybe it’s just me, but I think it’s worth crawling over the bark and finding a way in to observe what’s there, in the center of the trees.
The newest paintings explore the eucalyptus, a strange and beautiful species that carries a contradictory set of associations here in northern California, where the beauty of its peeling bark and elephantine forms is inflected by the knowledge that the species is invasive and highly flammable. Trees have always served as important symbols of our shifting cultural values and concerns, embodying views of nature that range all the way from the romantic and sublime to the apocalyptic. For me, big trees have two faces: history and continuity on one side, precariousness and peril on the other. We fear the loss of our great trees in fires and storms (made more violent by climate change), and, especially in the West, we fear the destruction they can wreak on familiar landscapes and our homes. But we also look to the trees as giant, benevolent timekeepers and witnesses of our personal and natural history. The trees are the planet’s great respirators (and keepers of carbon) as well as emblems of social and ecological stability. Theirs trunks are virtual maps of time, their intricate patterning reflecting the vagaries of the local environment over time; their great limbs reaching into unclaimed spatial territory, their hollows and stumps disclosing the ghosts of past disasters. Prominent figures in our landscape, trees project endurance and beauty, but also a menace and, increasingly, our worries about the future.