Why Trees?

You probably thought that I had committed myself to faces, that I was Diana Meredith, portrait artist. I’ve sometimes thought that myself. I like making faces, but for my current project where I am mixing acrylic paint and digital media, I wanted a different image.

Trees in summer are surprisingly hard to depict. They are so big and so amorphous. But our northern hemisphere trees in winter are simplified. I love that that great big form can be defined by all those negative shapes - the diamonds, triangles, rounded pentagons and weird twisty shapes that have no names. When I was in art school we had to do an exercise where we drew a tree by drawing its negative shapes. I sat in Queen’s Park and drew a small tree that forked from the moment it came out of the ground. I was amazed that defining the negative space produced the positive. For months afterwards I walked around looking at the spaces between objects, people, and moments.

Many years ago I saw a painting by Toronto artist, Lynn Hutchinson, that depicted the Tree of Life - a very stylized tree filled with birds, fruit, abundance and beauty. Somehow this image has stayed with me. I wanted to make my own Tree of Life.

Wikipedia and some knowledge gleaned along the way tells me that the image of a sacred tree has been central to many mythologies, religions and stories in lots of cultures. Norse mythology has the Yggdrasil at its center.  This is the World Tree that connects heaven, Earth and the underworld. What about the Buddha sitting under a Bodhi tree?  My mother always told me there were three sacred trees of Ireland - the Rowan, the Hazel and the Mountain Ash. Let’s not forget the garden of Eden, let alone Avatar. Trees should be central to our consciousness – they process all that essential oxygen for us.

The more I try and capture the essence of Tree, the more I’m struck by the large presence they hold. Giants that hold space with grace and without argument; those deep, invisible roots and the aliveness in the space underneath. There is a magic I want to get at.

As I make my Trees of Life, I’m struck with how full of joy, energy and presence they are. So that is a scary subject to address. For years my brother has told me that my images are full of anguish. And for a long time Anguish and Pain seemed like very important topics. The world has too many pretty pictures and it didn’t want to look at the icky side of life. I felt I was a serious artist if I was making images that depicted pain. But now in this patch of middle age it seems to me that joy is a much more daring subject to address.  Not superficial pretty, you understand. Joy that drills down, joy that strips away. Joy that is essence, wonder and connection.

Even as the body ages, or maybe because of it, I am making my own Tree of Life because my life feels very full of joy, connection and presence. That’s a gift.