Study of a Tree

Study of a Tree at Field Farm, Williamstown, MA. 12x16 inches, oil on canvas panel.  I've been working on this one for a while. It's a real study in the sense that I am trying to do something different and learn from it. When I first saw the tree three weeks ago, it was like Annie Dillard's tree with the lights in it. Time will tell what I've learned.

Park Road Intersection and "The Case"

A version in color: 8x10 pastel over washes.

Annie Dillard writes in The Writing Life: "Write as if you were dying. At the same time, assume you write for an audience consisting solely of terminal patients. That is, after all, the case. What would you begin writing if you knew you would die soon? What could you say to a dying person that would not enrage by its triviality?"

Substitute the word painting for writing:

"Paint as if you were dying. At the same time, assume you paint for an audience consisting solely of terminal patients. That is, after all, the case. What would you begin painting if you knew you would die soon? What could you say to a dying person that would not enrage by its triviality?" I may fall short.

Lone Trekker in a Paintbox

The snow is melting. Hooray! But this image is from when the snow was still deep and new.

In The Writing Life Annie Dillard writes: "A painter cannot use paint like glue or screws to fasten down the world. The tubes of paint are like fingers; they work only if, inside the painter, the neural pathways are wide and clear to the brain. Cell by cell, molecule by molecule, atom by atom, part of the brain changes physical shape to accommodate and fit paint.

You adapt yourself, Paul Klee said, to the contents of the paintbox. Adapting yourself to the contents of the paintbox, he said, is more important than nature and its study. The painter, in other words, does not fit the paints to the world. He most certainly does not fit the world to himself. He fits himself to the paint. The self is the servant who bears the paintbox and its inherited contents. Klee called this insight, quite rightly, 'an altogether revolutionary new discovery.'" I am still working on the meaning of these words.

Three Trees and Annie Dillard

Actually they are the same tree from different angles. The first two are stix drawings and the top is a pastel. I was trying to capture the late day light in the trees, a la Annie Dillard. She writes in The Writing Life, a short book of great riches, "The work is not the vision itself, certainly. It is not the vision filled in, as if it had been a coloring book. It is not the vision reproduced in time; that were impossible. It is rather a simulacrum and a replacement. It is a golem. You try--you try every time--to reproduce the vision, to let your light so shine before men. But you can only come along with your bushel and hide it."

Pointing to a Snow Tree

This tree appears to have leaves, but it's all or somewhat all snow. The sun is behind the tree. I am looking for an image that expresses hope and joy. Hard to do with a cold, snowy scene, though I was exhilarated to be there, on my snowshoes no less. I might attempt a pastel version of this one. This is another 'big' drawing.

I continue to read Annie Dillard. The following is from Living by Fiction: "...You know how a puppy, when you point off in one direction for him, looks at your hand. It is hard to train him not to. The modernist arts... have gone to a great deal of trouble to untrain us readers, to force us to look at the hand. Contemporary modernist fine prose says, Look at my hand. Plain prose says, Look over there. But these are matters of emphasis. So long as words refer, the literary arts will continue to do two things at once, just as all representational painting does two things at once. They point to the world with a hand."

New Jersey Oils and the Tree with the Lights

These two oils I started last week and finished today. The lower one depicts how primitive the river's edge can be from its rising and falling. The top one is the frozen canal with a cedar tree. Fortunately for the ducks, the canal is no longer frozen.

One final quote from the magnificent Annie Dillard book, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek: "Then one day I was walking along Tinker Creek thinking of nothing at all and I saw the tree with the lights in it. I saw the backyard cedar where the mourning doves roost charged and transfigured, each cell buzzing with flame. I stood on the grass with the lights in it, grass that was wholly fire, utterly focused and utterly dreamed. It was less like seeing than like being for the first time seen, knocked breathless by a powerful glance. Gradually the lights went out in the cedar, the colors died, the cells unflamed and disappeared. I was still ringing. I had been my whole life a bell, and never knew it until at that moment I was lifted and struck. I have since only very rarely seen the tree with the lights in it. The vision comes and goes, mostly goes, but I live for it, for the moment when the mountains open and a new light roars in spate through the crack, and the mountains slam."

This is why I paint and draw, to see the tree with the lights in it, though I seldom see it.

Listening Trees

Annie Dillard in Pilgrim at Tinker Creek writes, "I want to think about trees. Trees have a curious relationship to the subject of the present moment...I live with trees. Trees are creatures under our feet, creatures that live over our heads, but trees live quite convincingly in the same filament of air we inhabit, and, in addition, they extend impressively in both directions, up and down, shearing rock and fanning air, doing their real business just out of reach...they abide."

Later she asks, "What if I fell in a forest: Would a tree hear?"