Redtree Times

Paul Klee, Blossoms in the Night

I was asked yesterday if I talked to my paintings.

Interesting question.

I talk to myself. I talk to animals. I talk to the trees and plants in the surrounding forest. I talk to my car. I talk to my studio, which actually has a name. I talk to ghosts, present or not. Whether any of these things or creatures listen is another matter.

But talk to my paintings?

It immediately brought to mind a section of a famous lecture that I had been reading recently and had really resonated with me. It was On Modern Art, delivered in the 1920’s by Swiss artist and a personal favorite of mine Paul Klee:

Paul Klee, Small Picture of Fir Tree, 1922

May I use a simile, the simile of the tree? The artist has studied this world of variety and has, we may suppose, unobtrusively found his way in it. His sense of direction has brought order into the passing stream of image and experience. This sense of direction in nature and life, this branching and spreading array, I shall compare with the root of the tree.

From the root the sap flows to the artist, flows through him, flows to his eye. Thus he stands as the trunk of the tree. Battered and stirred by the strength of the flow, he guides the vision on into his work. As, in full view of the world, the crown of the tree unfolds and spreads in time and space, so with his work.

Nobody would affirm that the tree grows its crown in the image of its root. Between above and below can be no mirrored reflection. It is obvious that different functions expanding in different elements must produce divergences. But it is just the artist who at times is denied those departures from nature which his art demands. He has even been charged with incompetence and deliberate distortion.

And yet, standing at his appointed place, the trunk of the tree, he does nothing other than gather and pass on what comes to him from the depths. He neither serves nor rules–he transmits. His position is humble. And the beauty at the crown is not his own. He is merely a channel.

This very much sums up how I’ve always felt about art, especially my place as an artist– a mere channel or transmitter.  And when I look at my paintings, the crown of my tree, it is not in the form of a conversation so much as listening to what the paintings have to tell me. I paint because I question and, at best, the paintings provide some answers and insight that I might not find or see otherwise.

So, do I talk to my paintings? Not so much. But do they talk to me? Yes. And I do my best to listen…

This post originally ran in 2010 but I like Klee’s thoughts and run it back out every four or five years. I’m adding some music this time around. The song is I Talk to the Trees from the musical Paint Your Wagon. My choices came down to the movie version from Clint Eastwood or an instrumental version from Chet Baker and Bill Evans. Not a hard decision to make. Here’s Chet and Bill.