Trying To Be A Tree
Trying To Be A Tree, Oil Paintings & Mixed Media artwork exploring a Syncretic reading of the Mytho-logistics of Trees, People, and People Transforming into Trees, 2011-2018
“And all at once she [Harmony] understood what myth is, understood that myth is the precedent behind every action, its invisible, ever-present lining.”
-Roberto Calasso, The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony, p. 383
/My recent work explores the visual metaphor of human/plant hybridity as a way of examining the possibility of consciousness evolving, if not a conscious evolution.//The painting, drawing and mixed media pieces in this series draw heavily on classical mythological tropes, but give them a fresh stylistic and conceptual rinse.//It feels important to look at the old stories, our psychic and spiritual roots, vis-à-vis the millennial anxiety of my generation, and the eschatological promise/premises of an increasingly dystopian contemporary landscape.
//The trees were our first gods, and in this work, and in this time, I feel we may yet have much to learn from them.// JQ, ‘14
The branching canopy, the root structure, the density of material expression in a painting or a building, the organic development of form and structure in the biological world, the mythic-dramaturgical strings that compose the net of being in our lives and in our minds––these are the things that we must understand, that we must accept, that we must value, if we are going to survive, as a species. This work is an homage to the appearance of the world, its continual becoming, its miraculous existence, and I hope that it can create for you an awareness of this, the preciousness of your life, the serendipity of our paths crossing, the significance of the echo and of laughter, the irretrievable splendor of the real, the ineffable persistence of imagination, the undeniable of connection of everything with everything else.
