The Artist Statement from the Tree Portraits Monograph:
Walking down a path through a forest, or even just sitting in the middle of one, is one of my favorite things to do with my time. I especially like revisiting familiar stands, where the trees call out to me. If no one is looking, I will wave to them in greeting and give a whispered hello!. I may reach out and put a hand on the rough trunk, to feel its life energy running through it. I love to meet the trees face to face, some new, some old, friends. I walk up to one of them, as close as I can get. It pulls me in.
The craggy and weathered skin of the tree shows its bark full of crevasses and canyons like a topographic map of some sort of wooden landscape. Its texture is like a fingerprint, defining its identity, its existence.
Relating to the trees as equals, in human scale, I run my fingers over where the face of the tree could be, to get another sense of its identity. Each tree is like a universe unto itself. A different kind of universe than the one we think of at first, but a kind of universe just the same.
Trees stand over us and give us shade and shelter and most importantly, the air we breathe. They witness our past and our present, as well as stand ready to read our future. They are a part of our historical record. Their bark shows their age and the life they have lived through so far.
As humans we walk among them, often taking them for granted. Others we touch repeatedly until they shine with the bits of us that we have left behind.
My fine art work is, for the most part abstract, based on concepts and theories. But that does not mean that I cannot find examples of those concepts and theories, as well as beauty, in the tangible structure and forms of nature. I often create work, and then realize that I may have made a series that needs an explanation in relationship to my overall larger body of work. I am contemplating how the Tree Portraits juxtapose themselves next to my abstract work, and to the concepts that I like to thread through it. That’s one of the beauties of working with the concept of space and time – it can be looped in abstractly or figuratively through all things. Even trees.
View Tree Portraits:
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Hard Copy Book and Digital PDF Preview/Purchase: Tree Portraits