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The Tree of Life, pt 1

My Long Adventure Creating an Artificial Tree

For me, the whole thing started with this painting. Without getting too far into the details, this painting, entitled The Garden of the Hesperides was painted by Sir Edward Burne-Jones in the early 1870’s. It depicts three women holding hands and dancing beneath the limbs of a tree that bears golden apples. Entwined around the trunk of the tree is a serpent. Predating the Eden myths by thousands of years, the ancient Greeks believed this garden paradise to be located in what is now Southern Spain. The apples were said to grant immortality to anyone eating them, but to acquire the fruit would prove to be difficult as the women would sing and lull any intruders into a deep sleep. The serpent, named Ladon, would then devour the sleeping prey. In the famous legends of Heracles, his quest of 12 labors brought him to this garden where managed to steal the apples through some trickery involving Atlas.

My obsession with this tree and it’s story began sometime in 2003-2004 while I was working on my Freekmagnet project. Images from Freekmagnet can be found here: http://freekmagnet.com . Being struck by the idea of a sacred tree bearing wondrous, immortality - granting fruit, I felt I needed to depict this scene in my own way. Sacred trees, I found, are present in many myths from around the world, and rightfully so. The notion of a living thing that is rooted in the earth, that touches the heavens, and on top of that, bears nourishing fruit, provides a powerful symbol for the human psyche. Throwing in a trio of sisters that tend to the garden on top of that makes this image very powerful. Again, being another common mythological theme, the triad is said to represent three cycles of a woman’s life: the maiden, the mother and the crone. As with The Three Graces, The Fates, The Furies, and in Norse Myth, The Norns, we see this triad again and again. Really knowing little of the subjects of sacred trees and triple goddesses, I feel that both deserve further investigation.

My First Try: The Artificial Palm 2003-2004

In this period, between 2002 - 2005, I was working diligently on my Freekmagnet project. Freekmagnet is a series of of black and white photographs that I produced and later compiled into a book. With the help of Elli at Paperlilly Press, we printed the pages out on her desktop printer and put them together with a simple wire binding from Kinko’s. Altogether there we about 40 copies produced. The images are my interpretations and depictions of all sorts of things ranging from ancient myths and tarot cards to simple portraits of various eccentrics that I was spending my time with.

The artificial palm, shown above, I constructed over a period of 3-4 weeks during the summer of 2003 or 2004. The leaves were made of painted canvas and PVC pipe, while the trunk was made from a wooden post wrapped in cardboard. All in all, it took me about 80 hours to construct single-handedly. At the time, there was a major heatwave that swept through The Bay Area, and I distinctly remember watching the paint dry instantly as my sweat dripped onto the freshly painted surface. The finished tree measured about 16′ high and 14′ in diameter. Having worked with many different people as models, I’d tentatively secured three friends of mine to pose as The Three Graces (they actually were sisters in real life), but as The Fates would have it, the photo shoot never happened. None of the sisters were ever in town at the same time, and the scheduling process just never clicked. The artificial palm stood in my Oakland warehouse for close to two years before I gave it to my friend Eric Groff. I was moving out of my studio and into a regular house in the Oakland hills, so I didn’t have a place to store the tree. The tree was displayed for a couple of months at the Liminal Gallery in Oakland, and after that, I don’t know what happened to it.

Fillmore CA, 2007

Fast forward to 2007. Now living in Fillmore with Amelia, I’ve been spending the last year messing around with a digital camera that I bought last year. Shooting and printing in color, I’ve been working on a little project depicting cards from La Loteria. For the most part, the challenge has been to find a simple formula and stick to it. The portraits are shot against a plain white background, while the images of fruit and packaged foods are almost straight table-top shots. The pictures and digital prints I’ve produced in the series have been good, but the process itself has left me feeling like there’s been something missing. I think that in working with the digital medium combined with the very straightforward subject matter of the images has sort of deprived me of both the thought process and the sculptural process involved in prop-making. After months of this, I’ve come to the conclusion that it’s time to branch out and try to work on a few new conceptual images. I wish to continue with the Loteria project sometime in the future.

I’ve decided to revisit The Tree of Life. This time, however, I’m going to build a different kind of tree. I learned a few things from the artificial palm. For one, it was to big. It was dramatic and realistic, but it was too big to frame in a photograph. Secondly, despite being huge, the branches were too low for a full grown person to stand under, making it impractical to use with human models. Third, it cost about $350 in materials which is way out of my price range right now. The new tree will be loosely modeled after an orange tree and will be constructed from old newspapers, bailing wire and driftwood. One thing I learned while hanging around with Eric Groff is use recycled materials and spend as little money as possible. Lastly, I’ve decided not to worry too much about who will be in the final shot, seeing how I don’t know a ton of people down here in Ventura County. For now, I will operate with the assumption that I will find people to be in the shot when the time comes.

I have decided to begin with the leaves and work my way down to the roots. The process began a few ago when I sat down and cut roughly 600 strips of paper out of a couple of old copies of the LA Times. The strips are pasted together with YES! paste, and folded in half with a piece of 18 ga steel wire sandwiched between the two halves. From there, they will primed, painted, and cut into the shape of a leaf. When I have about a thousand of the leaves made, I’ll begin twisting them together and joining them to form branches. I’ve been chipping away at the project, spending about an hour or so pasting leaves together after I get home from work. In that time I can paste together anywhere from 25 - 60 leaves, and I now have a box of about 400 squares of paper with wire sticking out. To be perfectly honest, I am in no hurry to complete the leaf making project only because once I do, I’ll be faced with the task of figuring out the next step: to affix the leaves to the branches and forming them into a tree shape. As I construct and finish the tree, I will begin focusing on the background of the photo. In the meantime, I will continue reseach into the origins and beliefs surrounding the sacred tree myths.

Jeremy