SBMA

Two works from the lovely Santa Barbara Museum of Art resonate with my experience bringing reflections on the religion of trees to the ISSRNC. On the one hand, it felt a little like the teeny tiny artist - painting a tree - oblivious to the all-enveloping weeping woman in David Alfaro Siqueiro's "The Aesthete in Drama" (1944); his canvas is about the size of each of her welling tears. Is focusing on trees irresponsible sentiment-ality in the face of climate catastrophe?

The other is contemporary Iraqi-American painter Vian Sora's magnificent canvas "Woodlands" (2020), an evocation (the caption explained) of the great forests of ancient Mesopotamia, continuing: A striking, tall form - a majestic tree - glows with the intensity of neon orange. Does its otherworldly hue signal the mythic power of a thriving forest, or does it gloomily foreshadow its eventual disappearance? 

 

The captioner thinks a later painting indicates the answer is the latter as the magnificent forests of Mesopotamia [were] decimated by deforestation and a cyclical climate that became hotter and drier. But maybe it's both. If our conference was full of gloom over human fecklessness, many of us reached out to other than human persons, not just as tragic victims of anthropogenic harm but as our necessary partners in the relationships which must be rebuilt and reimagined if we are to begin healing. Trees in particular are world-builders!