Sacred Trees, Trees of Life, Wedding Trees, and Other Trees

My wire tree sculptures have two related beginnings.  I became interested in Sacred Tree imagery while attending Jewish Theological Seminary of America, during one of my final classes called "Art, Archaeology, and Iconography of Ancient Israel."  For that class I had to do a 40 minute presentation with a partner, as well as a 20 page paper on Sacred Tree imagery. 

The main text that I was looking at for my research was Mariana Giovino's excellent "The Assyrian Sacred Tree: A History of Interpretations" printed by Orbis Biblicus et Orientalis in 2007, which discusses the magnificent so-called Assyrian Sacred Tree.  The AST comes in several forms, but the one as shown in the above link is absolutely majestic in its ornate detail.  Being drawn very much to the visual treat that it was to look at, I decided that I wanted to do my own Sacred Tree drawings, and possibly sculptures.  

Not long after completing my masters at JTS, my wife asked me to do a tree drawing for her that she would then embroider.  The final drawing appears to the left (and larger here).   The texts around the outside of the tree are Genesis 2:9 (the English here is NJPS), "And from the ground the LORD God caused to grow every tree that was pleasing to the sight and good for food, with the tree of life in the middle of the garden, and the tree of knowledge of good and bad" in Hebrew, and Revelation 22:2b (the English here is ESV) "...also, on either side of the river, the tree of life with its twelve kinds of fruit, yielding its fruit each month.  The leaves of the tree were for the healing of the nations" in Greek.  My favorite colors to work in are black and red, so I decided to add a touch of red up the middle of the tree.  Two to three months after that, I made my first wire tree sculpture, which I came to call Sacred Tree #1. From the drawing, I added one red wire to the tree, which is meant to symbolize the 'sacred' - in whatever form that may take.

Since then, I've done a series of 100 Sacred Trees, as well family trees, wedding trees, tree necklace holders, a Tree of Life, and I'm 33 trees into my indefinite tree series (indefinite in the sense that it will not be a number-limited series like my 100 Sacred Tree series) for a combined total of near 150 tree sculptures (and believe me, my fingers are feeling it!).  

I think what I've enjoyed the most about the trees is seeing how they've changed over the course of my making them.  I find my first tree to be almost laughable now, but when I first made it I was very, very proud of it.  Here is Sacred Tree #1 next to Sacred Tree #100, which is the best way to show the progress:

And here Sacred Tree #1 is next to my most recent tree, Tree #33:

Finally, here's a group shot that shows a variety of trees, including trees from both my Sacred Tree series, and my indefinite tree series:

A shot without shadows:

And a fun shot, courtesy of Francis H. Troy.  Because if you can't have fun with your art, why bother.

Temporal Art

Nothing that I'm going to write in this post is profound or new - but I find it weighing so heavily on me that I wanted to write about it somewhere, and the site that I've finally created to put some of my artwork on seemed appropriate.

Whenever I create any sort of artwork I always get stuck on the thought of 'now what' when it comes to finishing a drawing, photograph, sculpture, whatever.  When I was still living at home with my parents this was not a problem: we had a large basement with a lot of storage room, and we had another basement in a building in town that we could store things in as well.  As a result, 'what am I going to do with this next' was never really a big issue: it was going to be stored: I didn't think much more about it after that.  There were certainly things that I gave away in hopes that the people I gave them to would display them or somehow have them become a part of their lives, but in general there wasn't much to worry about.  That was high school and most of college.

Towards the end of the college I became a bit of an iconoclast.  My last semester of photography I only turned in two prints for the entire semester: and they were simply photographic documentation of my BFA show which was an installation of my dorm room that I built in the art gallery and lived in for two weeks.  It may have been the most interesting and enjoyable two weeks of my entire college career.  Aside from my BFA show piece (called simply 'Life') I did a number of other performance/installation pieces for my Advanced Photography class in place of actual photographs.  I simply believed that I was creating living photographs that didn't need to have the element of silver gelatin to validate them.

I started seminary as a full iconoclast.  I didn't bring much of my artwork to my apartment there, and I really had no interest in doing much artwork anything.  When I was applying for seminary my pastor at the time had asked me why the switch in topic: from studying visual art to studying theology, biblical studies, etc.  I explained that I wasn't really looking for a job in ministry but that I really wanted to just go to learn.  He pushed me a little more though and asked me very specifically about my art - what was to become of it?  Would I continue to pursue it?  The questions at the time surprised me because I had always kind of thought that he was sort of iconoclastic as well, and I thought that he'd be saying what a good thing this was.  But he wasn't.  As I fumbled and bumbled about why I was essentially giving up on artwork he made a comment that I'll never forget: he said, "You might be surprised that God may turn around and use your artwork."  When he said it I literally thought, "You have no idea how wrong you are" - I was completely convinced that he didn't have a clue as to what he was talking about.

My pastor turned out to be right.  As soon as I started seminary and told people what my undergraduate degree was in (as people are oft to share first meeting each other in an academic situation) people immediately wanted to know more about my art and see more of it.  Not a month or so in to starting the first full trimester I was asked to show some artwork at a chapel session as part of a session called "Artists Among Us."  I showed an assemblage piece that I had done in college called 'The Tangle of Sin' - a piece of particle board with a slew of metal and paint spewing off of it.  A fellow student (who was pastoring a church in south Minneapolis) came up to me afterwards and asked what I was doing with the sculpture.  I told him that I was collecting dust with it.  He asked me if he could hang it in his church to which I said 'yes,' but thought "Why would you want to hang this stupid thing there?"

I brought it over to his apartment and then spoke to him again the next week.  He asked me if I would come down and be a part of his church - as a youth pastor . The thought of me as a youth pastor was pretty hilarious I thought, but I wanted a challenge.  Challenge wasn't even the right word for it.  Three years later, having done both my practicum internship and my professional internships at the church, having spent some time with the most amazing possible people and gaining some of the most valuable experiences I'll ever gain in life, I can see that without that connection being made through the assemblage piece none of that would have happened - I know it.

As I've started doing more and more artwork again I have starting going full circle again: why am I making art at all?  Honestly a lot of it feels like a total waste of time: eventually it's all going to be gone - destroyed - somehow by something.  None of it is permanent - and I can't bring it with me when I'm gone.  So what's the point of creating temporal art that will eventually be gone?  Am I pursuing another spark to a huge life changing experience like with my church in Minneapolis?  What happens if no one sees the work that I'm doing or if it gets destroyed before I finish it?  Did it still have value if it helped me express something?  Or is it all simply a waste of time that I could have been doing something else - something better or something with an actual tangible value?  It's good for me to remember Pastor's words: "You might be surprised that God may turn around and use your artwork."  Right about now I could use some more surprises.