The Trees Collection
When in the forests, I’m always drawn to the fallen trees, the beauty of the cut ends of huge logs, and the ruggedness of the bark designs.
The pieces in this exhibition reflect a focus: The grain of the trees which depicts the life history of each, individual beautiful tree. The tree rings tell a unique story, and the vertical grain creates a landscape effect/water design which seems to connect the tree to its environment.
The inspiration for my work has also come from two lovely passages from Hermann Hesse’s wonderful writings about the spirituality of trees:
“Nothing is holier, nothing is more exemplary than a beautiful, strong tree. When a tree is cut down and reveals its naked death-wound to the sun, one can read its whole history in the luminous, inscribed disk of its trunk: in the rings of its years, its scars, all the struggle, all the suffering, all the sickness, all the happiness and prosperity stand truly written, the narrow years and the luxurious years, the attacks withstood, the storms endured. And every young farmboy knows that the hardest and noblest wood has the narrowest rings, that high on the mountains and in continuing danger the most indestructible, the strongest, the ideal trees grow.”
“So the tree rustles in the evening, when we stand uneasy before our own childish thoughts: Trees have long thoughts, long-breathing and restful, just as they have longer lives than ours. They are wiser than we are, as long as we do not listen to them. But when we have learned how to listen to trees, then the brevity and the quickness and the childlike hastiness of our thoughts achieve an incomparable joy. Whoever has learned how to listen to trees no longer wants to be a tree. He wants to be nothing except what he is. That is home. That is happiness.”
~~~Marie Powell