Tree Self-Portraits

Close your bodily eye, so that you may see your picture first with the spiritual eye. Then bring to the light of day that which you have seen in the darkness so that it may react upon others from the outside inwards.

Caspar David Friedrich, 19th-century German Romantic landscape painter

Art of Memory

But in silence and darkness, or in any case while the outer eye is not looking, but the mind is left in peace to make its choices from what memory conceals, the images emerge to the inner eye, half clear, half obscured images from the fertile night of the unconscious life of the soul, its dark fruitful depth. It is the surprises which come from inside: one does not know oneself according to which laws they come, or where from; but there is that difference between them and those which come from outside, that we recognize them as our most trusted friends; they are after all only an expression for what we longed to see. It is that which has struck roots in us, which grows forth and which wants to come out and take on form and character.

Julius Lange, Danish art critic 

I began a series of paintings in Fall 2006 when I was injured in an accident and my physical movements were restricted. I could not reach up or out to the side. An image came to me of a tree. I saw myself as a tree growing inside a too-small enclosure, and I became obsessed with drawing and painting that image. I envisioned my tree Self, not only with its branches and leaves compressed against the boundaries of an enclosure, but also weighed down and held in place.

I researched the devices used by arborists in the protection, support, healing, and training of trees, and then I used those devices to both encumber and protect the tree in my drawing. I made a painting using white gouache (opaque watercolor) on black paper. Weights hang heavily on the branches, pulling them down. Wires hold the tree upright and in place. The trunk is enclosed inside a black plastic tube, and one limb is bandaged. Finally, the roots are tied up in knots, like a tree confined in a too-small pot.

Self-Portrait as a Tree in an Enclosure was a point of departure for me. I had never before made such a deeply personal and symbolic painting arising out of my unconscious. I made the painting in Fall 2006 and then I set it aside. In April 2007, I went to the Mary Anderson Center for the Arts (MACA) in Mount Saint Francis, Indiana for a two-week artist residency, not knowing exactly what I was going to do there.

My second day at MACA, I made a painting inspired by Fra Angelico, an Italian painter of the Early Renaissance. I used the tree in his painting The Apostle Saint James Freeing the Magician Hermogenes as the model for my tree. In Fra Angelico’s painting, we see only the top and a few branches of the tree. In my painting, I included a slender trunk with a vigorous root system fanning out beneath it.

Journal entry April 18, 2007, Mary Anderson Center for the Arts

I spent all day making a painting of a small Fra Angelico tree with a slender trunk to which I added a wide exposed root system fanning out beneath it. This was an intense and focused experience. I entitled the painting Self-Portrait as a Young Tree.

After dinner, I set out for an evening stroll, following a trail deep into the woods. Suddenly I came upon a real tree, small, with a slender trunk and a wide, exposed root system fanning out beneath it, just like the tree I had painted earlier that day! Seeing that real tree in the woods was an astonishing experience. In fact, along a creek bed that was nearly empty of water there was, deep in the woods at Mount Saint Francis, a whole long row of trees with exposed roots. Finding those trees seemed to be an affirmation of the work that had come out of my psyche. This, I said to myself, is why I am here in this place.

So I continued to paint Tree Self-Portraits—twelve altogether—in order to explore my inner landscape—a full range of expression from darkness to light. Trees are a cross-cultural and timeless motif. They are symbols of life, fertility, death, regeneration, and the elements—Earth, Air, Fire, and Water. Roots are symbolic of the underworld and the unconscious. In my tree self-portraits, the exposed roots are symbolic of exploring and revealing my inner world.

I painted two of the trees in full color (in addition to the versions in white on black), and I intend to paint the rest of the series in full color.

The gloom of the world is but a shadow.

Behind it, yet within reach, is joy.

There is radiance and glory in darkness, could we but see,

and to see, we have only to look.

Fra Giovanni Giocondo (c.1435–1515), a Franciscan friar

The act of gradually bringing light out of darkness is a potent metaphor for me. This is reflected in my painting technique for the black and white gouache paintings. I stroke layer upon layer of white paint, from milky translucencies to white opacities, onto black paper, allowing the image to emerge gradually from darkness to light. I do not mix black and white paints to create the various grey tones—greys are instead dependent upon how much black paper shows through diluted white paint.

My work has evolved, both technically and thematically, to be about that which is hidden in shadow versus that which is revealed in bright light. What is clearly visible? What is obscure? What is hidden? How do clearly defined elements contrast with elements that are allowed to disappear?

I wish to make paintings that will draw the viewer in through the evocative quality of the paint surface itself. My hope is that viewing my art might allow others to access their own feelings and experiences. I highly value this reciprocal personal communication between artist and audience.

When I painted Self-Portrait as an Ailing Tree (above), I was reflecting on past illnesses, but I did not know that a few months after completing the painting I would be diagnosed with cancer. Because gouache can be dissolved with water even after it is completely dry, in response to the cancer diagnosis, I brushed water onto Ailing Tree to dissolve the painted growths and scars, thus symbolically melting away disease in my body, and I went on to paint over what was left of the white paint with colored gouache (below). The colored gouache in Self-Portrait as a Tree Being Healed was literally painted on top of what remained of Self-Portrait as an Ailing Tree. Tree Being Healed is unfinished, and is thus an expression of the uncertainty I was experiencing at that time.

Tree Self-Portraits on display at the University of Washington Center for Urban Horticulture Elisableth C. Miller Library.