The Naming of Trees (first published in Cobalt Review)
A word is a thing you fill with everything you know about it.
Instead however, a word that sounds familiar but that is actually unclear can shape-shift into something else, granting you the ability to substitute the meaning with almost anything else that comes to mind.
Instead of stopping to look it up, you as the reader may keep going, either ignoring that part of the sentence you couldn’t understand or supplanting the proper meaning with something that might feel right even if it were wrong.
Having never known anything about trees before, I was learning the basics from a watercolor technique book on painting trees. I was now learning the names. I had always invented my own imagery for oak, maple, birch, elm — these words that were familiar to me meant nothing more than some kind of tree. If I encountered one of these words in text or conversation, I would visualize a cluster of leaves over the flows of dark branches without anything to differentiate it from another type of tree.
Thanks to this book on watercoloring trees, now I knew oak branches stick straight out at right angles. Elms have a Y-shape that opens at its fullest in the summer when the leaves retain water, and that tighten up in the winter. The branches of sycamores curve wildly in every direction. Willow branches zigzag, and the foliage occupies the tips of delicate twigs in clusters. Maples have an overall egg shape. The birch has a light-colored bark. The dead branches of a palmetto stay hanging off the trunk like a skirt, unless trimmed, when the stubble takes on the pattern of crackle.
As an artist, I have my own ways, and rather than offering me techniques, the author’s watercolors were diagrams of information for me to memorize and recognize in real trees.
Now that I was learning the characteristics that went with these names, I would ask myself if I could hold them to memory better? Do I need to know the oak to paint it later in the studio? Does that one word help? I paint from memory and not from direct observation. If I now knew the names of trees, can I paint them with more authority?
But this was my next question: if I’m painting from memory, wouldn’t it be better to allow memory to do what it does best? If I am making sure the branches of an oak are obviously at right angles to a viewer, am I making more of a diagram and less of a painting? In spite of my wonderful trip through this informative book, it was becoming clear to me that my art was never about getting it right but about capturing the residue of a moment. This matter about the proper vestments for trees corrals me into thinking that there is only one approach available, and even with the informative points this book has to offer, I am starting to have doubts.
Often it is the technical approach that gets me coming up with figures and landscapes. That means I might not even know what I’m painting half the time before something starts showing up on the painting’s surface. I’ll play with paint and find a house on a hill. Allow the paint to do what it will when I’m stippling red brown onto a wet gray area and watch the house become rustic with brickwork along the walls; and after three brushstrokes that hold a half-mixed caking of black, white, and yellow ochre, behold the appearance of a dismantled contraption that is only a concoction that I found when playing with the paint — and this contraption somehow feels familiar even if it will have no name I can ever give it because I don’t really know what it is. Paint a tree, or paint two. One tree next to another, like two overlapping masses that almost abstract each other with their accumulated bulk. Why name these things and then paint them?
Putting aside all we have scientifically learned about trees over the recent centuries, what does a tree do for the person on the street? This is the question I should be asking. How do we approach plant life today that is universal, maybe no different from the people of other times? The understanding that came from standing in the shade or from admiring flowers or from pulling a fruit off a tree has not changed all that much in the expanse of time between us and the first people that did such things.
But how do we know this? Words from the distant past have reached out and touched our imaginations. Almost every other aspect of life from the past has been lost. But certain words did make it through to us. We only know the paintings from the Greco-Roman times exclusively in words; the paintings never survived the turmoil that ended antiquity. So that when one ancient writer claims that such and such an artist had painted a bird with such exquisite detail that an actual bird perched nearby and began singing to it, we picture this only inside our thoughts.
Quite apart from my obsession with trees, I was at the same time inventing ways of putting down my pictorial ideas. Even though I painted, I had given up on sketching years ago. Yet I still wanted to find a way to record things I saw outside the studio, developing a “sketching” technique that involved no drawing. It was purely verbal. I would write down descriptions of things I wanted to later paint. I was pursuing this unorthodox methodology because it tapped into memories, if still available, rather than how a scratchy image on a piece of paper represents the memory. The scratchy strokes from an actual sketch were usually haphazard, and so copying from such an image would do more to deviate from what you had in your mind’s eye.
Eventually, I boiled down the verbal sketches to three statements and nothing more. If that were not enough to help me raise the image from the recent past, then I considered it lost anyway. By the time I was getting into trees like this, I found that you didn’t even have to write these statements down, since there were only three of them. I was using the fuzzy image already in my thoughts with these three memorized properties. When I got to the part in a painting when the image was captured but still blurry, I took the three descriptions and chiseled out these points of interest.
And this became a system that I would use in my work, a pocket-full of causal rules for each painting. It was verbal, like reciting an incantation, like the secret words to unlock a portal or summon an entity. I found that as I painted these things from those three statements and the moving image in my head, I was revisiting the aspects of the thing involved and then putting it back together — deconstructing and then reconstructing it. And I soon noticed that the order that the statements came out affected the work on a fundamental level. If I first used words for a piece of distant soil and then a nearby flower, that sequence made the work go in a particular direction, just like it would take it in a different path if focusing first on the nearby flower and then on the distant soil. Likewise, if I conjured the dominant colors before the forms, that would relinquish a unique set of effects, and then again different if the forms came first.
I’m stumbling into a contradiction because names are words, and words are what I use in this sketching technique to aid me in holding a memory. I see words as those pieces of symbolic material that flit across the things that catch our attention, and the same word can even establish faulty connections with things if there is a misunderstanding, and this is not necessarily improper or wrong. A contradiction? It depends. If a name is followed by a definition, we have turned the corner and arrived at a dead end that holds nothing but a single object, and this is a trap. If I use words to invoke a surge of memory, it is a magic spell.
I will try something today. Instead of using my sketching technique or the revelatory book on trees, I will start with nothing but an idea, and after thinking a moment, it comes to me: growing the painting like a plant. Starting at the root, I’ll paint my way through the trunk, creating textures that a random, ruined brush makes — that kind of brush that has had paint collected in its ferrule consequently splaying its hairs like wild weeds in the cracks of an abandoned gas station. Pushing the excess paint upward, I will delineate the climb of branches according to one of the four or five patterns I have observed in trees on my hikes, and the wild bristles will form their own specific conclusions on the texture and imperfect contours. From there, I will use a brush with shorter bristles to stamp in leaves with a thick green put together by adding deep blue to a lemon yellow. And if this brew evokes a tree I find familiar, I will bring the final details to life however I can without any other obligations. Even if verbal fragments keep going off in my head.
— Rey Armenteros