the large pine and red earth
For pretty much the entirety of my last laptop’s life (about four years) this image served as my desktop wallpaper.
From the painting’s centre, which might as well be the centre of the universe, this mad alien object flings forth what might nominally be branches and leaves into a cosmic swirl of blended colours.
What is it? Is it even a ‘tree’? I’m serious. It is certainly not a tree as we see them daily with our disenchanted eyes, swaddled, like most of the things we’ve seen a million times, by the general idea of them.
Cezanne painted it, and he was, through his strange looking, always trying to define things beyond the received idea of them, either through querying their volumes or their edges. Yet, as his most famed critic Merleau-Ponty has it, he reaches for these qualities perpetually but never settles on an answer. Why? Because in the intensity of his gaze he ‘doubts’ whether edges or things exist separately in the maelstrom of the reality we order through perceptual habit. He wonders always if he is getting it down right. In his slow reaching he goes further than other painters of his time, who perhaps thought themselves more sure of the nature of things, ever could. And yet, the objects in his paintings are profoundly and paradoxically ‘real,’ odd entities emerging from marks on canvas. I guess a doubting search can do that.
Trees are weird. They are living things that are not human. The large pine often looks like an alien to me. Lovecraftian even.
The closest the large pine comes to having actual edges is at its weird core. Here, the link between the branches and trunk practically squirms with psychedelic intensity (and yes, the eye is psychedelic, as in it reaches towards what the psychedelic eye reaches towards). Here is where my imagination gets lost and sometimes sees both a tree and ‘something else’. I guess that ‘something else’ is a communication about the strange mystery of all life rendered in paint. It is a purely visual communication so it would be foolish to elaborate on it too much. What words do come to mind are in T.S. Eliot’s Four Quartets.
The dance along the artery
The circulation of the lymph
Are figured in the drift of stars
Good words but they only scratch the surface of the intensity I detect. Words could never, and should never, try to contain a statement such as this.
We trot past paintings like the large pine in galleries. I recommend putting a painting you might like but feel like you don’t ‘get’ as your desktop wallpaper. As Cezanne knew there is a lot to be said for long looking. However, I have not fully come to terms with this incredible image and I doubt I ever will.
