Watercolor Sketch Painting - A Walk In the Forest

“Forest Bathing”, watercolor painting, 7in x 5in

To stand amongst mature trees in the forest can feel very grounding; it reminds me of endurance, rooting, and persisting in one place for many decades. This red oak tree, along with many other trees have lived here in this forest for over 100 years.

The deeply cracked bark of this red oak tree indicates its age and acts as a suit of armor, protecting from unwanted insects and disease. The oak trees wide and expansive canopy provides wonderfully filtered sunlight below for life below and helps to cool and protect the forest floor.

Trees are invaluable to human kind for many reasons, and there are many people (Robert Frost, Henry David Thoreau, and contemporary Peter Wohlleben) who spend their lives protecting, learning from, and admiring trees and forests around the world. I once stumbled across a carved sign in a forested area of the U.S., with a beautiful poem. Although unattributed on the sign, I later looked it up to find out it was originally written in Portuguese, by Alberto de Veiga Simoes, and was displayed on the grounds of a castle in Lisbon, Portugal. (Article: National Tree Week)

“Prayer of the Woods:

I am the heat of your hearth on the cold winter nights,
the friendly shade screening you from the summer sun,
and my fruits are refreshing draughts quenching your thirst as you journey on.
I am the beam that holds your house, the board of your table,
the bed on which you lie, and the timber that builds your boat.
I am the handle of your hoe, the door of your homestead,
the wood of your cradle, and the shell of your coffin.
I am the bread of kindness and the flower of beauty.
Ye who pass by, listen to my prayer: Harm me not.”

Portraits of Nature: My Wish, in three paintings

The painting, My Wish, was inspired by an experience from a fall afternoon in early November several years ago. It must have been unseasonably warm, because I was out on my bike riding through the borough of Manhattan. Traveling towards the Brooklyn Bridge, a bike path carried me into City Hall Park. I felt transported as I passed between elegant limestone buildings and mature shade trees, along a cobblestone pathway.

My Wish 03, oil painting on wood board (2018)

To my left - a stunning pair of ginkgo trees don their brilliant yellow hues. It was just days before the leaves would drop. Completely enthralled, I stop and sit on a bench across from them to take in the beauty of the trees. There is an incredible sense of strength, history, and wisdom from this spot. Surrounded by memorials from the Revolutionary war, stately buildings over two centuries old, and the ginkgo trees which are many decades old and will likely exist many decades beyond my lifetime.

Ginkgo trees carry symbolic meaning for eastern and western cultures including hope, peace, strength, and longevity. They are a pre-historic tree species with ancestors that survived the ice age, the blast of Hiroshima, as well as dramatically changing climatic conditions over hundreds of millions of years. In their presence, it is possible to see this history embedded in the very structure of these trees. The roughly textured cool gray bark, the angular shaped branches with alternating nubs that sprout bunches of leaves in the spring, and the fan-shaped two-lobed leaves speak of an entirely different age. In their presence, I feel transported.

My Wish 03, process paintings

This painting developed over the course of a year, and evolved as I came to better understand this pair of ginkgo trees and what they represent. During the process I also created watercolor study paintings to explore the sense of light, architecture, and form and texture of the leaves/branches of the trees. These studies helped inform my approach for the oil painting and my language for describing the trees within their environment.

My Wish, watercolor paintings on cold press paper (2018)