In Memoriam: Trees I Have Known

These pieces commemorate trees that once lived near my home but are now gone. Some of them were broken in storms, others died of disease or were cut down along the road for a power line expansion. Wood from the fallen trees was salvaged for firewood, giving me time to more fully examine and appreciate it. Many of the oak logs were just too beautiful to burn, with lustrous, curly grain. Much of the elm wood was covered in mysterious hieroglyphics carved by bark beetles, rekindling my deep childhood fascination with the phenomenon. I have often photographed the patterns but it was only through a convergence of seemingly unfortunate events—a life-altering injury, the Covid shutdown, the death of a beautiful old elm tree in the yard and consequently, some beetle-carved wood ending up in the firewood stack—that I began to directly use the marks in my work.

Using a simple method of relief printing and materials I had on hand, I made rubbings of the surfaces on scraps of paper with wax crayons and graphite. I quickly understood I was treating the logs as matrices, with repeatable elements and endless possible combinations. In warmer weather I moved outdoors to rub the tree stumps. I embraced the jagged chainsaw scars in the wood as a tactile record of events in the lives of the trees. I incorporated the rubbings into larger compositions on better paper, used them as bases for drawings, cut them up for collage and stitched some into books. I worked slowly and incrementally through the seasons, exploring familiar techniques and discovering new tricks along the way.

For the paper sculptures, I learned Takuhon (ink rubbing), a traditional Japanese printmaking process used to take relief impressions of dimensional stone, metal or wood objects and carvings. I made a variety of daubers (thanks, YouTube!) and experimented with different inks on many kinds of paper with mixed results before finally purchasing some Gasenshi, a paper formulated for the wet strength and surface qualities needed for this specific process. I formed the wet paper on the wood and daubed etching ink on the raised surfaces to transfer the textures, casting and printing each log in sections. Once dry, I cut, folded and assembled the parts into 3-D objects. I wasn’t attempting to replicate the trees but instead to make something to remember them by.