December 5, Barren trees

“I’ve seen that tree many years earlier and it was a most beautiful oak tree, with its large crown. At that time I did not think to paint it. What is in filling out the space with a splodge of green like others do? What is in Nature separated by large spaces, is compressed into a cramped space and overfills and oversatiates the eye, creating an unfavorable and disquieting effect on the viewer. Yet it was the lightning that came from the ether which achieved this feat of creating the space for me to paint the tree, but ... I finished by only painting the distance.”

These are the painter Caspar David Friederich's words and they refer to the portrait of a tree which, after having been hit by lightening, had lost all its leaves and remained the barren, majestic ruin of its former glory. I used to study this German painter's work many years ago, he occupies an important place in my book on melancholia. Cristi sent me this quotation a few days ago, and I had an experience of shock at the sudden reminder of what I used to enjoy so much and am not able to any longer.

The figure of the barren tree is most appropriate to my present condition, and I take that as a good omen. While on my daily walk this morning, I decided to open a new theme in my photo documents, that of barren trees. Those belonging to fall into winter, most often waiting for the next spring to be revived, but also, sometimes, dead. Upon returning home with a few new takes of such trees, and opening this new file, I went through my last year's photographs and discovered, to my wonder, that I have tens and tens of such subjects. It seems I have been interested in lonely barren trees all along.

     

Just like Friedrich remarks, the barren tree allows for space to become evident. Whether the painter achieves his purpose, of painting this space, between branches for instance, and their volume in space, is of lesser importance. He did succeed in seizing the distance between the tree and himself. Otherwise put, maybe, the loneliness of the painter himself, face to face with the tree which we always perceive as lonely when it is barren.

When I had just moved in this house and had just begun our walks along the trail, I used to pass every day by a wonderful old tree, so old and long dead that it had lost all its bark and appeared naked beyond remedy. I had also recently learned that dead trees are most useful for many such critters like the woodpecker, and should not all be taken down. Our own land is filled with dead trees, and they will certainly remain there until returned in decay to the ground. Yet this old, naked tree, I learned to greet every day as I passed by like you greet a neighbor you know from afar but do not talk to. In the absolute solitude of my walks, He reassured me. Until, one day, new owners moved in, and shortly after the old trunk disappeared. I was inexplicably saddened. But what should I have expected for Him?

Not long ago we decided to replace the carpet in so many rooms of the house with hardwood floors. The choice of wood was a most interesting matter. Colin likes pine, and I, for some reason, like the ash, if only for its beautiful name. There was another pretty name in the draw, hickory. We finally decided for both pine and ash, and the work will start next week. It is an opportunity to turn yet again the house upside down, get rid of many things which should have been discarded, yet have found a hiding place and go unnoticed here. For a few nights, between sleep and wakefulness, I wondered what this enterprise was about. It is a wonderful thing, to be sure, to lay wooden floors in the rooms, and let that smell of the Forest take hold of the house. It is also a good thing to imagine that those many ash trees, killed by the ash beetle, will find a new, if artificial life, under Rocky and Alice's clicky and wishy paws. The good neighbor who will do the work assured me that the wood comes from the woods around here, and I took it as the sign of another, lesser known, attachment to the immediately surrounding landscape.

I have said, at the beginning of this note, that the barren tree was a figure of what the painter needs, to understand, or seize, true distance. That which is Barren, in Friedrich's sense, lets the space breathe in between the branches, lets the wind fashion, little by little, nakedness, to the point where it becomes sculpture. That which lets the sky, the earth show their magnitude. All which without the barren trees remains overwhelming, impossible to grasp.