Trees: I am awed by trees but I don’t enjoy painting them. My mind rolls it over and over as to why these eloquent, primal, enduring, life giving and supporting entities in our world are so elusive to my painting skills.
I excuse myself from the studio most days for a walk around our neighbourhood and there is one tree that has made me think it was possible to again attempt painting a likeness. It’s a tree that has become a rare species here, the mature healthy ponderosa pine. The pine beetle devastated our forests in ’05 and ’06 and the ensuing years of wind and snows have levelled areas to piles of blackened pick-up-sticks.
I planned to take a picture of this tree and put it in the painting queue.
On this morning’s walk Huz joined me, and as we neared “The Tree” that provides shade for a house, homes for birds, beauty that has no superior, my heart knotted up into my throat hearing the shrill screaming of limbs being sawed off, this living being standing there with no defence, fully cognizant of it’s parts severing off, conscious of it’s parts being torn to shreds in the blades of roaring gulping chipper below. The sound and sight overwhelmed my composure.
I wept the rest of the walk.
With words, I can only scrape the depth of the agony it sends into my soul. You may think me over dramatic by describing the tree as if it is a human being but while you’re thinking, include that science proves trees live in communities. They are families that don’t compete for light, food and water but share. A mother tree ‘nurses’ her young. An ‘intruder’, yes, is competition. See What Plants Talk About on the Nature Series on PBS for an insightful example of this.
We assume trees don’t feel because they haven’t a nervous system but they are conscious; conscious of light – they grow toward it, conscious of attack, they heal an opening with pitch, conscious of intruding species by not sharing food and if they survive the competition it follows that they are the fittest and should carry on the species with their seeds. They must also be conscious when they are being killed.
I have mourned the deaths of trees so many times, I can’t keep it to myself anymore.
Trees that are cut down because they are ‘messy’, (physical exercise to clean up the “mess” is good for us, or move then if that’s too that much effort) or because they block the sun, (shade in a desert region like ours is an energy saver) or the house isn’t perfect because the roots are cracking the basement, so mend it and live with it. Must we always dominate nature?
I chose to live with her perfections and allow ‘her’ nature to enrich my experience of life.
A robust ponderosa pine with 8 inch needles bursting with life, it’s trunk rich cinnamon and grey patterned was cut down today, it’s vanished. The evidence of it’s murder scene shredded and removed from the location. It’s children watched, could they turn off their consciousness?
I heard the tree screeching for it’s life, filling the air with it’s rich perfume, with the scent of tears. Don’t you realize it’s an elder and has so much to give future generations of all that lives beneath and around it.
Can you understand the injustice I feel.
Once home I switched the painting I was working on for a clean canvas and was seething with distress of the image of the raw pain that would take shape. I paced around the room. How could I live with looking at what I would paint – it would be so very harsh.
So I decided to paint with words instead because there is such a great need for beauty in this tired old world so I switched back to the painting in progress and in between the blues and terracottas I wrote this rant.
Yes I love trees, I respect them, I am in awe of them and maybe some day I will paint a good one but more important is that I value their lives as much as my own, no, even more.
Mairi Budreau Art, Naturally 