Arboreal Personal Essay

“The Landscape painter must walk in the field with a humble mind. No arrogant man was ever permitted to see nature in all her beauty…The world is wide; no two days are alike, nor even two hours; neither were there ever two leaves of a tree alike since the creation of the world…”

- John Constable

Arboreal began wholly unexpectedly during a workshop I was teaching for the Harwood Museum at the D.H. Lawrence Ranch north of Taos. The workshop was based on Georgia O’Keeffe’s famous The Lawrence Tree painting, which she made at the ranch in 1929. When teaching, and painting, there are a few questions that I repeatedly ask – and while under the shade of some old ponderosas on a hot August day, the attendees and I meditated on the location, on the creative act, and on the trees around us, asking: “Why paint?” “Why paint this (whatever it might be)?” And “Why paint this, in this way?”

O’Keeffe’s painting, if you’re unfamiliar, is memorably composed. We, the viewers, are positioned looking upward to the night sky – but it’s mostly obscured, and our eyes are directed along the trunk of a large ponderosa pine. It angles forcefully in from the top left of the piece down to the painting’s center. Between us and the starry night is the tree’s big, tall, burnt sienna and red trunk, and then its branches, unfurling outward, holding up the tree’s dark canopy. And finally, beyond that, the Great Beyond stretches into the vastness of space and time.

It’s a wonderful painting that leaves a mystical imprint. At the ranch today you can even lie down exactly where O’Keeffe started the piece and see mostly what she saw in 1929. The tree still stands; its branches are much the same. So, too, is the night sky behind it. Georgia O’Keeffe, though, is of course gone now. As is D.H. Lawrence. And here we are; who knows how many of us will die before that tree falls.

Why paint this?

One of the oldest trees on Earth, a spruce in Sweden, is over 9,500 years old. Some Aspen stands in Colorado are one giant organism, with a root structures that are tens of thousands of years old. In Mountains and Rivers without End, Gary Snyder writes of a bristlecone pine that’s over 4,000 years old. Here’s an excerpt from his poem, “Old Woodrat’s Stinky House”:

Ice ages come one hundred fifty million years apart

last about ten million

then warmer days return—

A venerable desert woodrat nest of twigs and shreds

plastered down with ambered urine

a family house in use eight thousand years,

& four thousand years of using writing equals the life of a bristlecone pine—

A spoken language works

for about five centuries,

lifespan of a douglas fir;

big floods, big fires, every couple hundred years,

a human life lasts eighty,

a generation twenty...

Big, sweeping arcs of time. One tree that has stood with Wooly Mammoths, before Rome, before the pyramids, before civilization as we mostly know it. A fir that lives five centuries. Coast redwoods that live 2,000 years or more. In the introduction to The Hidden Life of Trees, Tim Flannery wonders “if the reason many of us fail to understand trees is that they live on a different time scale than us.” All our modern wars and conquests, our inventions and discoveries; what about living through 9,500 winters?

We all know trees. Their presence is woven into our sense of place, of safety, and even our own inner beings. Deep in our brains, for example, is the “Tree of Life,” the Arbor Vitae, a branching structure mediating cerebellar signals as you read this. In our dreams, trees can be expressive of psychic growth; of the branching pattern and increasing fullness of individuation. The architectural tome, A Pattern Language, speaks about the importance of tree places in human habitation: “Trees have a very deep and crucial meaning to human beings. The significance of old trees is archetypal…There is even indication that trees, along with houses and other humans, constitute one of the three most basic parts of the human environment.”

We live under them, we eat their fruit, we burn them for heat. We build our homes out of them. We nap in their shade and play amongst their branches. We shelter amidst them in storms and marvel at them through the seasons. They create a place to be; they give us a sense of safety. And they set the scene for our lives to continue, with us usually unaware or unattendant to the myriad ways that trees sustain us. Even in this very moment, for example, as you and I breathe in: thank you oxygen, thank you trees.

So this is “why” paint trees, is it not? What better a subject could there be?

Content as well as context

Yet so often, they’ve been a means to an end, not the end alone. In Elegy Landscapes Stanley Plumly touches on something noteworthy that John Constable did in an 1823 commission of Salisbury Cathedral: he framed the cathedral with an arch of trees to “soften” the intensity of the building. In this way, the trees set the stage and lent context to the structure. It’s effective, I think, partly because this is much what trees do in our lives. And it also underlines that trees were not seen as a main subject of a finished painting; they were a part of the whole pastoral scene, even for someone like Constable who loved trees. It was he, after all, who painted many tree studies. In Study of the Trunk of an Elm Tree, one of my personal favorites, he fills half the pictorial space with a solitary tree trunk, framed such that we see hardly more than two branches. It feels like a prayer to the tree in its largess and elder-hood. And yet it is – explicitly – no more than a “study.”

It also was Constable – among many other painters to come – who moved landscape painting, and painting the places we know in our bones, to the foreground. Plumly writes, “Trees represent, for [Constable], natural yet at the same time animate beings, alive in their particularity. Trees, indeed, may be Constable’s first intimate understanding of what his real subject is, nature as a pastoral; nature as content as well as context.”

Content as well as context. What better a “why paint this?” than the scale, the power, and the depth and breadth of impact a tree can have in this world? Trees as the content itself: the reason for Arboreal, the reason to head out into the elements asking questions in the form of paintings to see what answers arise.

The universe in a tree trunk

And so, last August under the Lawrence Ranch ponderosas at 9,000 ft., reflecting on O’Keefe’s Lawrence Tree – composed with the Tree as the subject – my own “trunk” came into being: Trunk #1 (Thank you), 60” x 40”. Not a study. It’s something of a nod to O’Keeffe and Constable: the trunk, shown at about midway up the tree, is the center of it all. Some branches extend out, situating the distinctive globe-like bursts of ponderosa needles. And behind this, off in the distance, is a solitary summer cloud. It felt intimate, personal, close up.

In the powerful book on relating deeply to the Cairngorm Mountains in Scotland, The Living Mountain, Nan Shepard wrote: “To know fully even one field or one land is a lifetime’s experience. In the world of poetic experience it is depth that counts, not width. A gap in a hedge, a smooth rock surfacing a narrow lane, a view of a woody meadow, the stream…” Over time, Shepard went from ‘peak-bagging’ to hiking “merely to be with the mountain as one visits a friend, with no intention but to be with him.” This is about the power of depth of relation; of correspondence when we know not where it will go. And when we meet a thing, place, person again and again, arriving at the seeming floor or ceiling – and then, still, showing up – then new horizons open before us. Here in Arboreal it is the trunk of a tree, an undulating fall canopy, or the community of cottonwood friends – literally – sustaining each other in a field.

In the introduction to The Living Mountain, Robert Macfarlane touches into the evolving concept of closeness with the local; the mundane; the parochial, even:

Over the past century, ‘parochial’ has soured as a word. The adjectival form of ‘parish’, it has come to connote sectarianism, insularity, boundedness: a mind or a community turned inward upon itself, a pejorative finitude. It hasn’t always been this way, though. Patrick Kavanagh (1904–67), the great poet of the Irish mundane, was in no doubt as to the importance of the parish. For Kavanagh, the parish was not a perimeter but an aperture: a space through which the world could be seen. ‘Parochialism is universal,’ he wrote. ‘It deals with the fundamentals.’

In the hyperlocal is the universal; in the deep knowing of one thing, we find essential elements of all things. Even literally: electrons, protons, neutrons; dark matter, empty space. Constants rearranged in infinite diversity; essential principles, core logic. The Big Bang is in that tree trunk, and if we look closely enough, we might just see it.

Why paint this, this way? (The process of painting trees)

It starts at the bark. In the morning light heading up Yerba Trail again – after more times than I can readily count – I notice for the first time a big conifer at the canyon’s mouth. Its bark is gnarled. Its crevices are deep, strikingly impactful, tactile; both intimidating and appealing, approachable and almost violent. Its roots grab into the duff; boulders and scree from the cliffs above pile around the trunk. Behind it deep shadow leads up to a creek; at its feet is bright blaring morning light. Chiaroscuro. Dark/light.

Nine months later, I decide to hike up to paint it – Tree in the Trail, 60” x 48" – and the piece ends with the bark. It’s like a dream for impasto; might as well spackle it on there. And yet the process feels perilous. Nothing about this tree or painting comes easily. First it’s 60 pounds of gear to haul to the site in an old trekking pack and then it’s wind and then it’s carrying the big panel and the pack and the supplies to the edge of the Columbine Hondo Wilderness. And then after all that and getting to the tree, it’s the wrong time of day, and it’s hauling everything back to the truck – noting with relief how difficult painting and hauling a huge wet panel would have been in the wind and how I must not, cannot, return in the wind.

And then the next day it’s all the same again. Driving back, and hiking, and hauling, but as the commitment to paint outdoors in the landscape often leads to, I’m doing precisely the opposite of what I yesterday deemed essential. I’m painting in the wind. And boy it is so windy. Very, very, very windy. The 60” x 48” wood panel is bungee-corded to a tree and jostling the whole time. My umbrella is blowing over. My paint mixing table is blowing over. I’m underprepared. The sun keeps moving. The shade keeps leaving. I can’t see well; I’m tired and hot and altogether despondent, but holding onto the faith that something in the essential wisdom of the process will answer the call.

This is the way of many outings. Young Ponderosa in the Vastness Beneath Blanca Peak, 108” x 48”, has its own flavor: An unexpected rest stop find en route to an unrelated destination. Two months of hemming and hawing until finally, on a seemingly good afternoon, I hop in the truck and drive over the Colorado border to paint. And it ends up being not at all a good day to paint. Again horrendously windy. Dusty and difficult and altogether impossible, and still, there we have it, a painting arrives.

We are the landscape, we are nature

Painting outdoors is often attributed to those who are gluttons for punishment, who enjoy suffering. To be clear: on a cold winter day, I like a cup of hot chocolate on a couch with a warm blanket as much as anyone. Yet it feels essential to this work that my preference to be comfortable not outweigh the call to correspond directly with the landscape.

The perplexing, and exciting, and initially consternating-to-realize thing is that even after all the effort and frequent discomfort, there are no landscapes in landscape paintings. And there are no trees in Arboreal. It took me a while to realize this, and at first I wondered, not very hopefully: well then what’s the point? In a painting, we see an incomplete translation of the artist’s response to a constellation of physical and visual perceptions, rendered through a medium to varying degrees of success. In Arboreal are heartfelt responses to moments when trees and me were together. There is something that we recognize as image of “tree”, and there is paint, and there is the artwork – the evidence of a correspondence, within the vessel of the creative act, having happened.

This is nuanced, as I have written before, because what also is true is that we are the landscape. Literally, tangibly, quantifiably; emotionally, spiritually. Are we not patterned by nature, woven of nature, and growing as nature? In the landscape we see a mirror of ourselves, whatever “we” are: more non-human cells than human cells; water from streams; nutrients from plants, animals, and earth. The blood in our veins flows just like the rivers. Storms and blue sky echo through our innerscape.

Hans Hoffman and Jackson Pollock had a now famous conversation at Pollock’s studio in 1942, apropos of our relationship to nature and the creative process. Hoffman, seeing no evidence of still life set ups or models in Pollock’s studio, asked him, “Do you work from nature?” Pollock responded, “I am nature,” and then Hoffman warned: “You don’t work from nature, you work by heart. That’s no good. You will repeat yourself.”

‘I am nature.’ Whether this was profound or profoundly arrogant is debatable. But its sentiment matters nevertheless: when painting, we are nature painting itself. No matter the subject, no matter the end. We are landscape, being landscape, painting landscape.

It might be that Pollock and landscape painters a century before him were of like mind. William Turner - Constable’s 1800’s contemporary – presaged Pollock’s sentiments, belonging to “the first artists for whom the creation, the act of painting, began to play a role for the picture.” In other words, in his work the artist’s process – the nature of the painting act – itself was a valued part of the final piece and not something hidden away. According to Francois Cheng, historical Chinese landscape painters saw it much the same.

Converging with this sentiment of being nature, of the action of painting – of being – constituting a finished work, mid-20th Century master Mark Rothko said:

I'm not an abstractionist... I'm not interested in the relationship of color to form or anything else...I'm interested only in expressing basic human emotions - tragedy, ecstasy, and so on. And the fact that a lot of people break down and cry when confronted with my pictures shows that I can communicate those basic human emotions... The people who weep before my pictures are having the same religious experience I had when I painted them. And if you are moved only by their color relationship, then you miss the point.

For Rothko, the form, the look, the aesthetics were not about theory. His revolutionary structure and treatment of color, his sense of possibility in directly transmitting experience by way of color – it arose from the direct human experience within the process. In being in “religious” experience, and painting as this, he conveys a “religious” experience. His paintings became portals for others to feel it as well. His human experience of emotion – of our inner landscape; like the external world, emotions are biochemical and electric as much as anything else – was nature, and as such he was nature, being nature, painting nature.

Choosing to paint nature, as nature, today

Today, when painting has receded from the consensus forefront of creative innovation, it is an act outside of time and yet, still, very much of this moment. We live in an orgiastic diversity of art-forms and cross purposes that reflects the complexity of our world: art for beauty’s sake; art as social action and critical intervention; art as agnostic onlooker; art as nihilism; art as essential comfort; art as material excess. Artificial, videographic, sculptural; transactional, ideational, colonial, imperial, naive, contemporary, feminist, post-post-post modern; futurist; anachronistic. Every medium, everywhere, all the time. A Brillo box, a urinal. A happening, a performance, a banana peel on a wall.

To choose to paint, today, then, is to choose to do so not as a default or an obvious choice, but as something else. It could be a matter of preference. I prefer playing with fun colorful paste while being outside over computers and being inside. But I wager it is more than that. Painting is a physical act in an increasingly digital time. It is slow – relatively – and error-laden; unpredictable; old fashioned. No A.I. can do it; no Instagram Reel can convey its fullness. It is singular, unique to a moment; it can never happen again.

And possibly, in saying all that, my best answers to, “Why paint?”, “Why paint this?”, and “Why paint this, in this way?” are one in the same, echoed in Constable’s advocacy to “walk in the field with a humble mind.” As he said, no “arrogant” – from arrogare, and arrogate; to take something without justification – person is ever permitted to see nature in all its beauty. In many ways, this is setting aside division and acknowledging connection. It is valuing what is outside our doors, and heading into it to relate directly with it.

To paint demands I set down preconception, certainty, predictability, and isolation. A painting does not improve with ideas of what is “mine,” and what is “me,” and how important “I” am, and by who’s measure. In the process of making this show I learned that there is a still-living tree that was 4,500 years old when we started using the written word. I realized that on my favorite trail is a tree I hadn’t stopped to behold in ten years of hiking right by it. The commitment to head into nature affirmed again my – our – connection to nature, affirmed my existence as nature, and reinforced in the bones of the process that, as such, I am a small part of a vast wonder. It’s humbling, empowering, and infinitely variable – and right here in the parish Kavanagh wrote about.

Hans Hoffman and Pollock were never going to win the debate of who was more right: to paint from nature or to be nature. They were describing two sides of an essential whole. We are nature, yes. And it’s really helpful – important even – to relate to that which we are integrally connected with. Heading out into larger nature, we find the vastness of landscape presents never the same leaf, never the same sky, never the same day, never the same thought. One day’s strategies might inform the next day’s, but can never strictly apply again.

And having said this, how better to “walk…with a humble mind” than to acknowledge nature, the landscape, and especially trees by meeting them where they are? Outside, in weather and light and time. By the river and in the high alpine forests. To be in their presence is affecting. The resulting work is then shaped by them and the elements that they, too, are shaped by: sun, rain, heat, cold, wind, snow. It becomes something of a collaborative effort even as my body is the one applying the paint. I do my best to respond to an indeterminate call and then do justice to a place, or moment, or individual tree. The body is the vessel of feeling; skill with the medium is the facilitator; and, nature is the director. The landscape is nature and I am nature. And together, work arises of that unique moment. No two leaves on a tree have ever been the same; no work is ever more or less than the moment, and the content and correspondence, that shapes it.

Arbor Vitae

When I look at Young Ponderosa in the Vastness Beneath Blanca Peak I’m struck by the tree’s size and vigor, and the vastness of space surrounding it. The juvenile tree is tall and stretching skyward, its needles turned up in the blustery high valley wind. Its central trunk and branches bend and roll, up and out, some visible and many obscured by the exterior canopy of green.

Looking at the tree elicits something, a personal thing: the winding roads my life has taken; the branching out we humans undergo as we hopefully develop into a greater whole. And I think to myself how comforting the shade beneath the tree is, even the little bit of it, and how as the tree grows, so too does the shelter it offers.

What a being! Existent, tenacious, graceful, and vital, growing up in a place as inhospitable as I have ever been. And my body settles some in that. And I feel longing, and wonder about its friends – do trees have friends? Yes! Very much so according to The Hidden Life of Trees – and I wonder and wonder and feel. How old is that tree? Who else has stopped here? How does the starry night sky shine behind its silhouette?

Gesturing to the infinite; pointing to the moon.

As the sun sets behind juniper and piñon north of Questa, N.M., where I painted Fresh Light (Thank you Daniel), 48” x 120”, I hear the echos of that evening and give thanks to the trees. I think of The Lorax and the tree along Yerba Trail, of Van Gogh’s cypresses and Constable’s Elm. O’Keeffe’s nighttime tree comes to mind, and so too do the forests above Taos. I take a deep breath and give thanks, and I exhale:

Trees, lungs of the land, friends along the way, thank you for your shade and your shelter. Thank you for your company. Thank you for the wood in my home and the fire in my hearth. Thank you for your wisdom and your patience. I give thanks even if you do not hear; I feel grateful even if you do not know. My world is better by every measure, my life fuller, thanks to each and every one of you.