The trees have been through this before

Painting trees, drawing trees and tree references and prompts!

Hi art friends,

This email is meant to nudge you into making tree art with me. All the way at the bottom are a bunch of prompts—skip to there if you want to jump right in! I’ve made dramatic modifications to some of my photos to help us see shape, texture, light, negative space and movement in more contrast!

It’s been a tough couple weeks. I’ve been trying to practice daily remembering in some physical-material way what my personal scaffoldings are that get me through the hardest of times. Making art of trees, walking outside, touching the Earth, looking at the sky, dancing, hugging people I love for a bit longer than usual. I know that staying regulated and healthy makes me more helpful and effective on a collective level longterm. We are all feeling a lot of intensity right now, but on a personal level this intensity isn’t new to many, it’s just more because we feel like we’ve gone backwards in such a huge way.

I chose trees for this month’s theme months ago because trees are part of my support network. Maybe they are for you too? If you feel like you are carrying a lot more worry and fear right now, maybe you’ll want to spend the next few weeks (months, years) in a practice of coming back to what supports your nervous system. I plan to use the collection of references below one at a time to explore textures, light, shape, characters, environments to play, be in the materials and practice spending more time in details (something I struggle with but want more of in my work). My aim is to simply find joy and let my grief just be present in the nourishing presence of the tress.

Prentice Hemphill says that the first step in healing is to recover our ability to IMAGINE. Imagine what doesn’t yet exist, and staying committed to it. Trees feel relevant to imagining a future where human rights and dignity are universal because they are a perfect metaphor for resilience, reciprocity, mutual aide and respect for millions of kinds of individual and collective expression that don’t invalidate each other just because they seem different.

UPCOMING: Live virtual art making together: Thurs., Nov. 21, 6:30-7:30pm Eastern

For $5, join live each month (and likely more as soon as we’re up and running :) I’ll provide an art activity and prompts and we can just be together and chat!

I’ve loved trees my whole life. I mean love like a friend and caregiver. I can remember climbing very tall tress as early as age four. When I was very young trees were safe places to feel full of adventure and wonder. I felt their sturdiness and reliability as personal, loving care. Perched up in a tree I was away from a world that was already telling me that who I was wasn’t okay, that my interpretations of what was happening around me weren’t important or even real. I was drawn to trees whenever possible because their smell and feel and calm presence held my nervous system. 

When I read Robin Wall Kimerer’s Braiding Sweetgrass I realized what I have felt my whole life has a language. As she writes here in an essay on trees, “When I sit with white pines, I wordlessly come to know things that I didn’t know before.”

Trees don’t need to be convinced that carving your own path is gloriously joyful and valid, or that growing forever is what we’re supposed to be doing! Trees are full of contradictions: they are strong and fragile, regal and weird, reach for sun relentlessly yet stay connected to each other underground through mycorrhizal networks.

Trees are just as they are—they don’t stop being so even when terrifying powers try to force them into compliance. They resist and persist and adapt. And for anyone who goes to them often knows, they are always there for us, waiting for us to come back. They provide for us unendingly. Today I see trees as my parents. I go to them when I need someone more knowing than myself to tell me everything is going to be okay, as it always has been, even when things are really bad. Because the trees have been through this before.

So, let’s get more acquainted with one of our biggest allies in living through the biggest of storms—the trees. I have been taking these photos for months for us, and there is a lot here. Try some of these if you can’t think where to start:

1. Limited color palette: The cedar I made above uses analogous colors (colors next to each other on the wheel)

2. Use one of the references that emphasizes shapes you love, and forget about it being a tree and just make those shapes. Maybe it becomes something surprising!

3. Choose just one or two colors, one dark and one light, and use one of the references that emphasizes dramatic light

4. Make a realistic full tree

5. Make a row of stylized trees

6. Make stylized tree portraits

7. Zoom in and make just a few inches of detailed bark or the way a branch bends off the trunk

8. Use all rounded shapes for your shadows and light

9. Use all rounded shapes for every part of the tree

10. Imagine branches going on and on forever on a long sheet of paper—the photos of northern white cedar are great for this. 

11. Who is in the tree?

12. Night time

13. Tree is a character

I’ve also uploaded these to a Pinterest board here if you’d rather look at them there.

Thank you for being here. Please share your trees with me, and other things that are supporting you right now. I’ll share more of mine in the coming weeks.

Bear