The Challenge of Painting a Tree

Painting a tree is hard. I say hard as part whiner and part pirate. It’s haarrd.

Children make drawing a tree look easy. I watch them as they fill a page of the sketchbook I offer when they seem curious about the painting underway on my easel. The encounter starts when I feel a presence at my side, a head near my elbow.  Sometimes I ignore it, but usually, I’m ready to take a step back. As painters, teachers encourage us to step back, to compare our painting with the scene in front of us. The masters wore carpets to threads in their studios and ruts in the grass outside. “What do you like to paint?” I ask the child beside me. 

If they respond, I ask the parent if it’s okay, and offer the child my black, spiral-bound book, with the instruction to make a picture, and the provision that I get to keep it. Invited to draw what they see, they draw trees. Clouds and sun are the usual embellishments, though a cat and dinosaur have appeared. I sometimes continue painting the scene in front of me, and, sometimes I just marvel. When they are done, I request a signature, and the parent requests a photo of the child with the picture, and, sometimes with me, the artist.    

In painting outside, John Carlson, a famous author on plein air painting, says, one should stand two and a half times the subject’s height, away from it. Me? I like to be up close. I like to see the curl of the bark, the overlap and shadows of leaf upon leaf, and the way branches mimic the human body. Starting at the trunk, at the shoulder, that big bone of the upper arm, the humerus, each branch grows like the split to the two bones that create the forearm, to the twenty-seven bones that make the hand.

As painters we’re taught to get the shapes in first, to paint background to foreground and dark to light. Today, I chose a location that I’d painted previously in the summer. Then, the trees were three-leaf clovers with strokes of greens made of cadmium yellow medium and cobalt blue. It was lush, and easily meshed with a titanium white and cobalt sky.

My teachers regularly remind me to blur the edges.  We don’t see sharp lines through the atmosphere, they say. I made a scraper tool from an old credit card and dragged it once from tree to sky and once again from sky to tree. It blurred and blended till the trees appeared taller and further away. It became for me, my mother’s dressing gown; a chartreuse satin, with threads of yellow embroidery against a peek at a blue lace slip beneath. I heard my father’s keys jangling, muffled in his pocket, and watched as he pressed the crease in his fedora. She said, as she dried her hands on a kitchen towel and surveyed the balance of dishes in the drainer, “I’m almost ready, John, I’m dressed underneath.”

One teacher told me that when I paint trees I should paint the roots, but I can’t paint the roots. I don’t see them. In the scene today, I do see a sidewalk heaved and cracked by a Hulk from the underworld in search of water and nourishment. The broken sidewalk is dark, as if an artist had blended the color of the grass, the dirt beneath and dried leaves upon it. It’s clearly marked 1938. I can’t paint the roots, but I can paint their power. I only wish, that I could paint the hubris of homeowners who’ve recently planted saplings next to concrete slabs stamped with 2002, 2009, 2012, because, I know the Hulk will return.  Painting a tree is hard, I say to myself again.

The children paint the trunks brown. Tree trunks aren’t brown. They are made of colors that sometimes make brown and those same colors sometimes make purple and shades of grey.  I stare at the line of trees and I see brown trunks too. I squint and colors separate. My mind separates. I see her there among the other trees. A breeze blows. Her dressing gown disintegrates. I see a trunk with limbs of grace and strength, curves at life’s grand junctures. Seasons took a turnm nourishment in some years overflowing and in other year’s light. Her limbs flow from branches to fingers where the last of the leaves become her bravest bit of bling.

I stand back with my brush in hand, and, I miss my mother.

Painting a tree is hard.