The Blasted Tree: A Visual Metaphor

 

On a recent walk through the woods I saw that a large tree had two of its limbs shattered, possibly by a lightning strike. The breaks looked violent, with jagged edges, and an aggressive split. It's startling to see this damage amidst calm, leafy trees. And yet, it's a part of nature's cycle of destruction, decay, and regrowth. I wrote about this pattern here. Seeing this tree made me think of all the images of blasted trees in landscape paintings, and their meaning within those landscapes. 

Jacob van Ruysdael, Landscape with a Half-timbered House and a Blasted Tree, 1653

In her essay on Romantic landscape painting in Hyperallergic, Allison Meier writes:

What's important is that the tree is usually still living, leaves clinging to its battered branches. To the Romantics, it represented the cycle of nature, from death to life, all at once. 

Thomas Hearne, Blasted Tree Near a Lake, 1803

In Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, (1818), Victor Frankenstein describes himself as a blasted tree:

But I am a blasted tree: the bolt has entered my soul, and I felt then that I should survive to exhibit what I shall soon cease to be – a miserable spectacle of wrecked humanity,  pitiable to others, and intolerable to myself. 

William Blake, Blasted Trees and Flattened Crops, 1821

The idea of the blasted tree has great emotional weight. In Blake's wood engraving the tree is so much like a storm-tossed human figure, bent by the wind, with a few leaves clinging to its outstretched arms. 

Frederic Church, Storm in the Mountains, 1847

A solitary tree, its trunk split and broken, stands high above a turbulent landscape. It is as though Church is pointing to pride and resilience in the face of turmoil. 

Jasper Cropsey, Blasted Tree, 1850

Like in the Church painting, Cropsey situates his damaged tree high up on a precipice, overlooking a dark, foreboding landscape. This painting feels despondent to me, the blasted tree crushed, the light in the sky nearly obliterated. 

Lawren Harris, North Shore, Lake Superior, 1926 

In this painting––the only one I could find on this theme from the 20th century––Harris presents a more optimistic vision of a solitary damaged tree. The tall, central tree is bathed in light; its curving forms reach skyward, an evocation of positive striving. In the history of the arts, our relationship with nature has provided many metaphors, including this one of the blasted tree. Simon Schama wrote a brilliant book, Landscape and Memory, on the various myths and strong cultural connections that we have to the different landscapes surrounding us. In his introduction he wrote:

...the various ecosystems that sustain life on the planet proceed independently of human agency...But it is also true that it is difficult to think of a single such natural system that has not, for better or worse, been substantially modified by human culture...And it is this irreversibly modified world, from the polar caps to the equatorial forests, that is all the nature we have.

Borders, Boundaries

 

I walk across a small field in full sunlight. The light touches leaves and grasses, shifting with the breezes; it sparkles on the tall, thin grasses and glows on leafy surfaces. There is a trodden path through the growth, but the 4 foot tall flowering grasses still brush against my skin, with a slightly scratchy feeling. (I'd like to use the word raspy, incorrectly, as I think of a wood rasp, with its small holes, tickling away the edges of a wood panel.) Ahead of me I see the dark edge of the woods.

When I cross that border from bright fields to shadowed woods it is as though I am in a different body, one that is cooler, cradled, limited in sight. From a horizontal world, open and expansive, I enter one that is vertical, where I look up to treetops and down to the ground. I often think of the words of Robert Frost, which come to me unbidden: 

The woods are lovely, dark and deep

This line is from his poem "Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening". In it he speaks of that most unforgiving of borders, that between life and death, in saying

But I have promises to keep, 

And miles to go before I sleep,

And miles to go before I sleep.

In the woods are many stone walls, walls that used to be the borders between property owners, separating long-gone open fields. A few days ago I noticed the red boundary marker for the southwest corner of my property; I hadn't paid attention to these boundaries for years. 

Many of the walls have fallen apart; stones are no longer piled one atop the other in an orderly fashion; trees grow through them. The hard labor of transporting and placing large rocks and huge boulders is undone.  Another Frost poem, "Mending Wall", has a phrase that echoes through my head:

Something there is that doesn't love a wall

The poem is a wonderfully wrought, simply put questioning on the necessity of walls, because even though his neighbor insists

Good fences make good neighbors

Frost wonders why a wall is needed between an orchard and a pine woods. And we can now take that questioning out into the larger world. 

The curved line of metal is all that remains of a gate that stood in the southeastern corner of my field, a forlorn reminder of the futility of fixed boundaries.

The Magic of Sunset and Mists

It was serendipity that got me out of my indoor cocoon last evening and gave me the gift of a beautiful sunset. I was watching the remarkably beautiful, moving, and tragic film by Ettore Scola, A Special Day. Taking an intermission to get some fruit and see if Blinky the cat was back from his evening rambles, I stepped out on the porch to let him in and gasped at the color suffusing the landscape. Mists rising after an afternoon rain created layered veils of distant trees, turning the views into visual poetry. I got my camera, put on my gardening shoes and wandered outdoors until the light faded from the sky. Above is a view of my vegetable garden, facing west; it was my first shot, taken at 8:04 PM.

My favorite old apple tree had a strong presence silhouetted against the misted background trees. As I was photographing, I knew that these images couldn't come close to the experience of being in the landscape: they simplify in lights and darks; the richness of color in the foreground is flattened into dark drama; the soft haze of distance is partly lost. The air, the scents, the sounds are gone; the translation of a three dimensional world into two dimensions leaves out so much, but I wanted to try to record this nonetheless.
(I recommend clicking the images to enlarge them so as to see more detail.)

Coming closer to that apple tree a few minutes later, the emerging leaves were tinged with the sunset's glow.

Still facing west, a large crabapple tree against the brilliant sky.

The same tree a little later, with the ever changing clouds.

From the backyard I looked towards the east, where distant trees faded into pink haze.

This last shot was taken at 8:17 as the sky began to darken but color remained in the clouds. The telephone pole is holding up the world as wires cross the sky. In a brief quarter hour I was in an earthly heaven.

Retreating Snow

Last winter was a season of bitter cold and snow; this year winter couldn't be more different. I wrote happily about the late arrival of winter in a blog post dated January 5, and now, a month later, the landscape looks as though it might be mid March. The snow is disappearing and the sap has started running.

The small incidents of melting snow show little beauties, which I'm determined to enjoy although they are much more joyous after three months of cold and deep snow. The warmth of plants melts the ice....

....and they appear as though framed in glitter.

A still-green fern pops up above the snow alongside a graceful dried leaf.

I love seeing the leaves and branches that have fallen on the snow begin to settle into it....

....as their warmth creates a surrounding bed, perfectly proportioned.

There are circles clear of snow around tree trunks, warming for the spring season.

And on the front lawn patches of snow invite imaginative visions, of a horse....

....or a swaying figure. Of course winter is not yet over, and we may have more cold and snow, but it's good practice to enjoy whatever comes.

Water = Life

Mereia Anning, Hunting for Dugongs, 2001; acrylic on canvas.

Animals cannot live without water; scientists believe that life cannot begin without liquid water. An exhibition at the Hood Museum of Art, Water Ways: Tension and Flow, examines the relationship of water to human life. On a wall outside the gallery of photographs, many of monumental size, there is a small painting by an Australian Aboriginal artist showing traditional sustenance coming from the sea: fish, turtles, eel, and dugong (a sea mammal similar to a manatee). How long will our seas and waterways provide us with food if continue on our present path of despoilment?

Margaret Bourke White, Dust Bowl––Taken near LaMar, Colorado, 1953; gelatin silver print.

Yesterday, when I began working on this post, it was pouring rain. Here in the northeast, rain has been overabundant the past couple of years, while in the western United States there has been a drought of epic proportions. Bourke White's photograph, taken 20 years after the terrible dust storms of the "dirty 30s" shows that we did not learn from the mistakes made earlier. And we still haven't learned, as the Oglalla aquifer sinks and California farms suffer from lack of water. There is a great book by Timothy Egan and documentary by Ken Burns about the Dust Bowl of the 1930s, which I wrote about in this blog post.

Daniel Beltra, Alter Do Chao, Para (Brasil), from the series Amazon Drought, 2005; pigment print on paper.

It is not only in the US that drought has ruined landscapes: the photograph above was taken during a terrible drought in Brazil, where a vast watery region became dry and like a desert. What happens to the inhabitants during such a terrible time?

Nici Cumpston, Campsite III, Nookamka Lake III, from the series Attesting, 2008; archival print on canvas, hand colored with pencil and watercolor.

While some droughts are caused by natural weather patterns (should people be living in areas prone to drought or flood?), others, such as the American dustbowl, were caused by human activity. This dramatic work shows the drying out of one of the largest freshwater lakes in Australia. Overconsumption of water from the river that fed this lake is leading to its death.

Chris Jordan, Living Room Floor, Ninth Ward, from the series In Katrina's Wake: Portraits of Loss from an Unnatural Disaster, 2005; pigmented inkjet print on paper. 

Then there's the opposite problem of too much water. In this touching image of a mud-caked floor (sorry for the reflections at the lower left), we sense the tragedy of Hurricane Katrina and how it upended lives. The devastation of the flood was multiplied many times over because of the human channeling of the Mississippi River. The photographer, Chris Jordan, writes:

The 2005 hurricane season's extraordinary severity can be linked to global warming, which America contributes to in disproportionate measure through our extravagant consumer and industrial practices. 

Gideon Mendel, Joseph and Endurance Edem, with Their Children, Bayelsa State, Nigeria, 2012, from the series Drowning World; giclee print on paper.

Gideon Mendel has photographed the effects of flooding on the lives of people in several different countries in Asia and Europe. Joseph Edem is a traditional healer; he said:

This is my house. I was here when the rains began falling. Before we knew it the flood came. There was nothing we could do. I just ran out with me and wife and children. This water has been here for more than a month, with no help from anywhere.

Ian The, Kuye River, Yulin, Shaanxi, from the series Traces, 2010; chromogenic print.

In the exhibition are images of obvious environmental devastation, such as the one above, which looks nothing like a normal river landscape. Ian The writes:

Due to overmining, the water table has sunk, and the river that was once full is now nearly dry. The city, now wealthy from decades of coal mining, now regularly suffers from water shortages.

Edward Burtynsky, Oil Spill 1, REM Forza, Gulf of Mexico, 2010; digital chromogenic color photograph.

Image courtesy of Edward Burtynsky's website. 

Edward Burtynsky is a great photographer, both of beauty and of environmental degradation. His photograph of the BP oil spill is stunning and shocking. (I used a photo from his website, and the image below by James Balog, rather than my rather poor photos from the exhibition) Burtynsky writes about his series Water:

While trying to accommodate the growing needs of an expanding, and very thirsty civilization, we are reshaping the Earth in colossal ways. In this new and powerful role over the planet, we are also capable of engineering our own demise. We have to learn to think more long-term about the consequences of what we are doing, while we are doing it. 

James Balog, Birthday Canyon, Greenland Ice Sheet, from the series Extreme Ice Survey, 2009; chromogenic print.

Image courtesy of James Balog's website.

James Balog has been documenting the disappearing Arctic ice sheets in a series of gorgeous photographs, and in a powerfully beautiful and frightening documentary Chasing Ice, which I wrote about here; it is available for streaming on Netflix. His project is a very important one; we should all be aware of his work.

Altoon Sultan, Well, Rolinda, Central Valley, California, 2001; egg tempera on panel,15 x 17 in.

My paintings were not in this exhibition, but I wanted to show them in this post because they are about water. Twenty years ago I taught for three years in California and became aware of how the land was farmed: the bounty of produce coming from there was produced with irrigation and with lots of "inputs" of fertilizers and pesticides and herbicides.

Altoon Sultan, Young Pepper Plants, Gilroy, California, 2001; egg tempera on panel, 20 x 22 1/2 in.

The water came from far off, carried in concrete canals, or was pumped from groundwater wells, which held less and less each year. On a visit back to California some years later, I did studies for a series on water. A great book on water in the West, written in 1986 and foreseeing the problems that have now become so extreme, is Cadillac Desert: The American West and its Disappearing Water by Marc Reisner.

Tony Gleaton, A Son of Yemayá, Hopkins, Belize, from the series Tengo Casi 500 Años: Africa's Legacy in Central America, 1992; gelatin silver print.

We are immersed in water, we are water. According to the USGS, the brains and heart are 73% water, the lungs 83%; even the bones are 31% water. Yemayá is a mother spirit in Yoruba mythology, a "patron spirit of women, and the mother of all living things. She is often shown rising from the water or as the owner of all water." (from the wall label) May she protect us from ourselves.

At the Hood: American Landscapes

Thomas Doughty, Rowing on a Mountain Lake, ca. 1835; oil on canvas.

On my recent visit to the Hood Museum of Art, I enjoyed looking at the American landscape paintings in their permanent collection. Many of them depicted the local New Hampshire landscape, or that of New England. America––that vast "virgin" land, unpeopled in the eyes of the European settlers, close to God in its awe inspiring grandeur––was a great subject for many artists. Before the 19th century, landscape was so low in the academic hierarchy that many artists painted them only as backdrops to a story or moral tale. With romanticism and the concept of the sublime, landscape came into its own. A small painting like that of Thomas Doughty showed grandeur of mountain peaks, the fear in the blasted tree, the smallness of the human floating within this space and light.

Sanford Gifford, Mount Mansfield, 1859; oil on canvas

In this very large canvas, Gifford sweeps us out into a deep space that is softened by the hazy light of late afternoon. It is a perfect painterly definition of the Sublime: "the quality of greatness, whether physical, moral, intellectual, metaphysical, aesthetic, spiritual, or artistic. The term especially refers to a greatness beyond all possibility of calculation, measurement, or imitation."

Mount Mansfield detail

The figures standing on top of the mountain emphasize the overwhelming size of the landscape. They are there as observers for us, so we can also imagine ourselves in that place, having what must be a transcendent experience. 

Robert Seldon Duncanson, The Stone Bridge, 1851; oil on canvas.

Not all landscapes from this time were romantic in feeling. This modest painting by Duncanson, the first African American artist to have international recognition, is a more straightforward depiction of a particular spot. This is an attentive, poetic image, one that does not inspire awe, but a charming peacefulness.

Attributed to William Hart, Tannery in the Catskills, ca. early 1850s; oil on canvas

Tannery in the Catskills goes another step towards realism, with the contrast of mountain with the deforested landscape and industrial building.

Tannery in the Catskills detail

 It is a look at the new world of the Industrial Revolution.

George Inness, In the Gloaming, 1893; oil on canvas.

Inness brings us back to a romantic view of the landscape, with trees and grasses softened by golden light. The romantic and the naturalistic are two approaches to landscape that are still with us today. It has even been suggested that the paintings of Mark Rothko are in a sense descendants of the romantic American landscape.

William Merritt Chase, The Lone Fisherman, 1890s; oil on panel

It's fascinating to see that this vigorous and color-rich painting was made around the same time as the Inness above. It has such a feeling of the modern in its dramatic shift of space and its lively brushwork.

Rockwell Kent, A New England Landscape, 1903; oil on canvas.

Rockwell Kent's landscape is much more subdued in color than the Chase, but it has a similar modern compositional structure, with our eye hopping from rock to rock in the empty foreground, then back to the mass of dark trees, and on to a streak of light crossing the field, and the distant view.

Abbott Thayer, Below Mount Monadnock, ca. 1913; oil on panel.

Below Mount Monadnock is a very small painting, darkly mysterious, with trees almost undifferentiated, while the mountains in the distance have a crisp clarity. That contrast is beautifully compelling.

Marguerite Zorach, Mountain Stream, ca. 1917; oil on canvas.

Lastly, a refreshingly lively modernist painting by Zorach. You can almost feel the water spilling down over the dense rocks, whose forms are clear and heavy. Beyond the stream's energy is a soft wash of trees. It's interesting to think about this tradition of landscape and to see how it is still strong today (see for instance, my recent posts on Alex Katz and Cecily Brown); landscape is rich with image and with metaphor.