Tree Time
hopeful meditations on cycles and the steadiness of years
What’s time to a tree? Does it worry in the winter? Does it have good days and bad? I have to imagine that trees have more faith than I do.
January trees look dead, but they hold the quiet promise of spring. Cross-sections of rough trunks provide an uncommonly direct and beautiful visual of the accumulation of time. In this collection, I carefully transcribed bare branches from my NYC neighborhood and drew meditative tree rings in delicate charcoal pencil— literally planting hours of time in each piece.
In “Tree Time” both bare branches and tree rings are framed by rainbows— symbols of transcendence and new beginnings. I hope these pieces can serve as hopeful reminders of cycles and the the steady progress of years.
Tree time is a promise of cycles and growth.
This collection brought to you by….
COVID and the Omicron surge, meditation, a little set of colored pencils my mom gave to me years ago for Christmas, going outside even when it was cold, growing up in Texas and now living somewhere with seasons (and being fascinated by them), a little bit of winter blues, lots and lots of podcasts, Mitch Epstein’s tree photographs, Bryan Nash Gill’s woodcut prints, the tree slices I bought in Japan in 2013, my residency at Vermont Studio Center in 2017 when I first saw how strong of a symbol tree rings can be, my fairy godmother (who taught me to love the rainbow symbol), my Granny (who always had a rainbow-casting prism in her car), the “double rainbow all the way” YouTube video, an extremely dry radiator-heated apartment perfect for drawing in charcoal pencil, Christian mysticism/the resurrection story, how good sycamores look in the winter, and wool socks.