Not major news, the tree casualties of hurricanes. We excise them around our power lines, alter their natural symmetry and render them mutant, wounded, and in high winds, weak.
Along my walk route this morning, a few old friends wore sashes of yellow plastic police tape and an orange No Parking Today cone. Not a good look for you, I thought. Now the truck has arrived, the chainsaw started, the wood chipper fired up (a sound I hate), and soon, no dappled shadows, only direct sun where you once stood for tens of thousands of mornings. My mother died this summer, so I’m tender about death these days. The loss of a familiar old tree makes a round shape, a heavy ball of something to carry around in my mouth. Not the tightness of tears, just weight.
Recently, I saw an exhibit of landscape paintings, immense vistas on a grand scale, made by Albert Bierstadt, Frederic Edwin Church, the Hudson River School. These images were designed to evoke the magnificence and grandiosity of nature, in contrast with a few double zero brushstrokes to indicate the tininess of a man lost among twenty yards of painted canvas. I’ve stood on Bear Mountain, been that tiny figure, and looked out at the Hudson Valley. The eyes know a snake oil show when they see one, and the heart, given a choice, would take the mountain over the painting every time.
This isn't to say that painted trees can't be well done. I waited until those who stood an appreciative distance from the work moved on, so that I could peer at the technique close up without blocking anyone's view. Church, in particular could render lush moss growing on cracked and mottled bark with admirable skill. Screened on the exhibit walls were various quotes about nature and the spirit, lovely sentiments. These famous men were my tree loving brothers. Yet they seemed deluded by arrogance and determined to possess, as if with enough canvas and skill, a man could make something more beautiful than land, trees, light.
I've got a drawing of a branch on the table. Both the branch and the drawing of the branch are beautiful, but the branch is extraordinary in a way that my drawing of it is not. I feel humbled with every mark I make, so limited is the attempt. Why bother? What I am doing is worshipping this small portion of a tree, wandering in and around the forms with reverence, awestruck, the same way I copied pictures of Paul McCartney when I was thirteen. This drawing does not matter. What matters is the experience of looking, of kneeling at this miracle of a thing with a pencil in my hand.
The woodchipper has stopped, finally. There’s something in the ensuing silence that speaks of newly created emptiness, of absence. I rest my pencil for a moment and close my eyes.
Along my walk route this morning, a few old friends wore sashes of yellow plastic police tape and an orange No Parking Today cone. Not a good look for you, I thought. Now the truck has arrived, the chainsaw started, the wood chipper fired up (a sound I hate), and soon, no dappled shadows, only direct sun where you once stood for tens of thousands of mornings. My mother died this summer, so I’m tender about death these days. The loss of a familiar old tree makes a round shape, a heavy ball of something to carry around in my mouth. Not the tightness of tears, just weight.
Recently, I saw an exhibit of landscape paintings, immense vistas on a grand scale, made by Albert Bierstadt, Frederic Edwin Church, the Hudson River School. These images were designed to evoke the magnificence and grandiosity of nature, in contrast with a few double zero brushstrokes to indicate the tininess of a man lost among twenty yards of painted canvas. I’ve stood on Bear Mountain, been that tiny figure, and looked out at the Hudson Valley. The eyes know a snake oil show when they see one, and the heart, given a choice, would take the mountain over the painting every time.
This isn't to say that painted trees can't be well done. I waited until those who stood an appreciative distance from the work moved on, so that I could peer at the technique close up without blocking anyone's view. Church, in particular could render lush moss growing on cracked and mottled bark with admirable skill. Screened on the exhibit walls were various quotes about nature and the spirit, lovely sentiments. These famous men were my tree loving brothers. Yet they seemed deluded by arrogance and determined to possess, as if with enough canvas and skill, a man could make something more beautiful than land, trees, light.
I've got a drawing of a branch on the table. Both the branch and the drawing of the branch are beautiful, but the branch is extraordinary in a way that my drawing of it is not. I feel humbled with every mark I make, so limited is the attempt. Why bother? What I am doing is worshipping this small portion of a tree, wandering in and around the forms with reverence, awestruck, the same way I copied pictures of Paul McCartney when I was thirteen. This drawing does not matter. What matters is the experience of looking, of kneeling at this miracle of a thing with a pencil in my hand.
The woodchipper has stopped, finally. There’s something in the ensuing silence that speaks of newly created emptiness, of absence. I rest my pencil for a moment and close my eyes.
copyright to words and images belong to the artist greenheron
2011
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Comments
Sorry about your mum.
Sorry for your loss.
Sad but lovely post.
For some reason, I am reminded of a scene from an Alan Rickman movie about a doctor who was a pioneer of heart surgery. He had an assistant, an African-American man who did so much of the work and was largely uncredited. Anyway, at one point, during an experimental surgery on an animal, the doctor reaches in and feels what his assistant has done, and says, "This is like something the Lord made.", meaning that it was perfect. And even though I'm not a believer in a traditional "Lord", I do believe that most of nature is perfect. As an artist, it's clear that you understand how humble are any attempts to duplicate it.
And, oh, the atrocities that are committed upon trees by the power comapnies! Although I can't live without electricity, I am shamed by the price that it exacts.
And yet...some art transcend and transforms. As in your drawing here. Artists can (not always do, however) put their soul into things they worship. Beautiful as always. (And I'd love to share my Paul McCartney drawings with you. My preteen soul was left intact, I'm afraid, no matter how much worship I proclaimed over him).
I do hate to see trees die in that way. It is part of the cycle of their life, just as it is part of ours. Except in a natural world, their end is not marked by the sound of a chainsaw or wood chipper. Part of the soil is returned, some stand for the lookout points of raptors, both day and night, and some fall, open their hollowed out, dead portions of their cores to be homes for bees, raccoons, opossums and all manner of other things that creepeth and crawleth upon the earth.
Still, there is a sadness.
-r-
Oryoki...Vermont does have gorgeous trees, many of them clinging to the slopes of mountains. I did an artist residency in VT a couple of summers ago, in a town now badly flooded, and a friend sent me a picture of the dining hall, in an old mill next to what was a stream, and the water is up to the second level of windows. It is hard to imagine what trees do in those circumstances.
rita...thank you. Yes, all that beautiful sound lost, plus no calls from the birds that won’t be perched in it.
jramelle....a fellow sentimental tree fool! What a lovely comment. The mention you made about trees outliving us is something that makes them special to me too.
Rei....those oldest trees are maybe the hardest to lose. My community is historic too, and there was a multiple year battle waged here over a two hundred year old healthy tree standing on land the owner was determined to make into a parking lot. The night before it was to be cut down, a couple hundred people showed up with candles. I remember that tree every time I pass by the spot.
Jeanette....I share your ambivalence about using electricity and hacking up trees to get it into my house. Those were my exact thoughts today. I am not ambivalent regarding Alan Rickman however, and thank you for mentioning him in the same comment as you mention my drawing.
dirndl....what is with the budding young artist girls and musician portraits? The tradition continues in 2011, although it has branched out to include anime and deer. Thank you for the nice words about my drawing, but you’ve seen that view of the Hudson from those mountains, so I know you’re not serious ;-)
dunniteowl....exactly. There was an animal hole in that tree. Where's that animal tonight?
yes, but i see your drawing as a way of reminding us to look, to show us what we might see if we do and, therefore, excellent in its function and its beauty. rather like a tree, actually.
i'm still puzzling on the idea of the hudson valley and an entire landscape covered with trees, trees as one big green thing instead of single individuals that they are, each one different. and with moss and lichen. here in the southwest there are so few - trees and forests - and moss is so rare. i remember one time driving in a cab to dulles to catch a plane home, at sunset in the autumn, with miles of trees all around me, nothing else in sight, just trees turning color. i cried the whole way.
I know very well the ache of losing trees, trees I know personally, their acorn children, the family of squirrels nesting in their hair, and the woodpeckers that are like dentists -- drilling out the bugs. For a tree, the woodchipper is akin to a crematory, sawdust instead of ashes. I'm glad yours are quiet now.
Candace....you poor tree deprived thing! On the other hand, I have done plenty of crying out there in your California beauty. That little Hwy 1 vignette you described with me in the rubber bathing cap doing road laps up and back, add to it, weeping. There’s your crazy lady.
SheilaTGTG55...it is hard. One nearby street appears to be a whole new street. I hardly recognize it.
dianaani...a friend wrote to pick a bone with me for dissing Church, et. al., which I did not mean to do. I’m too subjective to write a good art review, although that has never stopped many.
Bell....I love the downy woodpecker dentist and squirrelly hair images. Over the years, I’ve become way too attached to the tree that grows just outside my kitchen window. It’s become like my big barky roommate. I stand out there on Wednesday mornings to make sure the garbage men don’t pull under it with their big smelly truck and break off any lower branches.
Monsieur....how lovely that you do that, plant new trees. I wish I could become more like a tree, for all the attributes you listed, and then some–strength, acceptance, calm.
anna1...thank you for those sweet words.
Matt...thank you too for yours.
The drawing; the reality.
Rated D
Best, Erica
but the way you write, well, (and so well, of course) it renders me incapable of coherent answer
appreciative silence
"This drawing does not matter. What matters is the experience of looking, of kneeling at this miracle of a thing with a pencil in my hand."
"I feel humbled with every mark I make, so limited is the attempt." Perhaps Church and Bierstadt felt the same, the difference being that they sought to portray beauty through the grandeur--the sublime--even while feeling inadequate. Or you're right, and they were talented but pompous asses. Can't say I know that. This I do know: you find the sublime in the small, the beauty in the gnarled and twisted. And you need not blush over any presumed inability to convey.
I now give a moment of silence to your friends. May their dappling shadows live in your heart forever.
We also lost a great (and endangered) Butternut tree to a chainsaw a few years back when someone in the neighbourhood was building a house. Shame they didn't want the hundred year old tree in their yard. Jack, being the artist he is, made an effigy out of wood. It is above the doorway in our living room.
Btw, beautiful detailed, textured drawing above Ms. Heron. Thanks for sharing it.
Did you really draw that branch picture? I should like to have it. You draw like you write - or do you write like you draw?
Your descriptions of the Hudson River School were masterful strokes of word art. Yesterday I discovered two wonderful painters of western landscapes. Tony Abeyta and Lawanda Calton. But let's remember what the poet Joyce Kilmer admits: "Poems were made by fools like me but only God can make a tree."
Dr. Spud...what an awful sound, especially when doing a duet with a chainsaw.
Dianne..."Ceci n'est pas une pipe" (ou un arbre!) :-)
Erica...thank you. She was something else. I miss her.
vanessa!....hope you are well in not really anywhere, and thank you.
u no me....thank you. Soothing. I like that. You got to imagine the woodchipper though. It is more soothing that way ;-)
Pilgrim....I could write another post about how beautiful the painters’ field studies were, done on site as reference for the giganto images, which were executed back in their studios. The studies were intimate, less ambitious and not grandiose. Hah–more like what I do....perhaps I’m the arrogant one? ;-)
Scarlett.....that is so neat that Jack memorialized the butternut....is it in wood from the tree? I have a bit of a magnolia tree, one that I had drawn many times, also once drew one of its branches every day in late winter-spring til it bloomed, and came home from work one day to find it just....gone, only a few bits the woodchopper missed. The bit sits on my living room mantel.
Hawley....thank you for reading. While I love trees, I also love wood, used to build guitars, my old house is wood, yet the lumber industry (well, all the industries you listed) just freak me the heck out.
Sandra...I’m honored to receive a visit from you. I’ve been a fan of your writing since I discovered OS, so your comment is a treasure. Kim Gamble also said I write like I draw and I am not sure what that means, but I like it.
Miguela...I love that hokey poem! Arrrrgh. Stumps. Like a gravestone.