If trees could talk

"Our bodies have formed themselves in delicate reciprocity with the manifold textures, sounds, and shapes of an animate earth - our eyes have evolved in subtle interaction with other eyes, as our ears are attuned by their very structure to the howling of wolves and the honking of geese.  To shut ourselves off from these other voices, to continue by our lifestyles to condemn these other sensibilities to the oblivion of extinction, is to rob our own senses of their integrity, and to rob our minds of their coherence.  We are human only in contact, and conviviality, with what is not human."
Abram, David.  The Spell of the Sensuous: Perception and Language in a More-Than-Human World .  

Today kicks off week three of working on a new artwork for my Tree Stories series. It is the first time I am using four panels of Indian (shizen) paper to construct one image.  The piece is inspired by the photo included in this post which I took during a 2018 winter vacation in Santa Fe, New Mexico.  

Photo taken 12.26.2018 in Santa Fe, New Mexico. Shot on iphone.

Artwork in process. Pastels on four pieces of 19 x 25 Indian paper.

Working on one of the four panels in my studio.

When I first saw this tree trunk, it looked like the face of a horse from the side,  turned to look at  the observer.  That is what I saw at the time, its fixed gaze.  I kept the picture and recently came upon it while scrolling through my New Mexico memories.  There is still something powerful about this image that has not let go of my psyche.  And so, I decided to make it an artwork.

Because the image gives me a sense of majesty and power, I felt it needed to be large in scope, so I sketched it like a jigsaw puzzle, piece by piece on four 19 x 25 sheets of Indian paper.  I love Indian paper because it is 100% made of recycled materials and it feels like fiber.  Sometimes, threads pull out as I rub the pastels against it with my fingers.  It is textural and reminds me of bark,  yet it is made of rags, not trees.  As I filled lines with my pastels,  so much more was revealed.  Not only did my choice of colors surprise me, but the thought, "what if trees could talk?" popped into my mind. The question surfaced from my subconscious because beings are suddenly appearing on the bark, as if their stories are within the tree, as if the tree is a reservoir of stories, recording scenes in time.  Only in the act of drawing this image, and looking at it deeply, closely, intimately, have the hidden stories, come out.  It's almost like when you first meet someone, and all you see is the surface, until they let you in and let you see their authentic self and share their experiences. That miracle of trust.

I don't know what those stories are, all I know is that something remains, spirits perhaps, an electric energy between beings that create color memories in others.  It is the knowledge of the land, animated and sacred.

Deep ecologists like Arne Naess, Gary Snyder, John Muir, have tuned into this energy for years, and many others, like Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry Thoreau, Rachel Carson, Walt Whitman who came before the term even existed.  Reflective of Native American religious beliefs, it is a state of being where one becomes the voice of the land, in alignment with "land wisdom." 

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Trees and "wildness" are my ultimate teachers.  I wonder what colors and lines I will discover this week as I listen and look deeper?

AMO