TREE PRINTS, LIKE FINGERPRINTS, TELL BEAUTIFUL PERSONAL STORIES
Growing little by little, ring by ring, outward and upward slowly each season. The world changes all around them but they remain, honorable memorials to people and events that have danced through time. To celebrate Arbor Day (04/26/13), we’re looking at art that celebrates the magnificence of trees.
Bryan Nash Gill has looked at trees, inside and out, and has created artworks from each. Though we are all familiar with the concentric circles of a crosscut log, Gill’s Woodcuts print series looks fresh and striking. Gill has long been fascinated by the artistry of trees, but it wasn’t until he began looking inside of them that he saw their the complexity of their beauty.
Gill begins his his creative process for this series by walking to a nearby tree “boneyard” to salvage wood from trees that would usually be burned or turned into lumber. He collects rough pieces of hemlock, oak, cedar, and maple—glorious heroes of the New England forest—and prints their cross sections onto paper or canvas. Gill’s prints are records of his personal connection to trees, and each is a record of each tree’s “personal” history. We can’t help but notice how startlingly similar these tree-prints are to human fingerprints—both beautiful story-telling marks.
Gill’s tree-based art stretches far beyond prints, including wood-glorifying sculpture, delicate works on paper, intricate etchings, and shrine-like installations, like this one, titled, “Needles”:
(Photo: Bryan Nash Gill)
For more information about Bryan Nash Gill, including upcoming shows, visit his website. Check out more beauty in trees in our feature about the Tree Angel, David Milarch, and his mission to clone ancient forests.
