August 2024

	Many expressions, same source
8.1.2024

	Beautiful surroundings
8.2.2024

	A big cycle intersects a bigger cycle
8.3.2024

	Not the trees
8.4.2024

	Yes, the trees
8.5.2024

	35 years ago I was drawing trees every day, claiming that I was speaking out for deforestation and that my work was about the environment
8.6.2024

After two years of drawing trees, stumps, and clear cut forests, I had an insight that these barren landscapes were not an environmental protest but were my nonverbal way of processing a recent death in my family. That realization clicked so hard with me that my attention widened and I began to see all my drawings as ways to reveal unconscious thoughts. My mindful improvisational drawing practice began. Now thirty years later it occurs to me that, yes, the tree stump drawings revealed my emotional state and inner processing, but maybe there is value in returning to and further interpreting the trees. Maybe the meanings and motivations are so layered that more stories are inside, waiting to put down roots and sprout new branches.

8.7.2024

	Remembering the leaves, branches, roots, and trunk; the soil, sky, historical era, squirrels, and birds; is there anything I can eat; who planted it, who owns the land, and who brought me to see it; can I climb it, did I climb it, and the weather.
8.8.2024

	The big oak tree, in front of my grandmother's house near Audubon Park, its huge branch extending over the street, every time we visited, seemed to dip lower and lower, until it almost touched the cars.
8.9.2024

	The tree blocking the road during a tropical storm
8.10.2024

	I remember the day we moved into our house. I was three years old. In the front yard were two saplings, barely trees. Almost sixty years later my parents are still living in that house and the sticks are towering oaks.
8.11.2024

	Visiting those oaks today at my parents house. I estimate the trunks are 3-4 feet tick. The tops must be 40-50 feet high and their width covers the lot. I no longer feel like I'm walking around outside in a front yard because there is very little grass. Now there is a sense of hanging out under a canopy of filtered
8.12.2024

We walked between the houses to get over to the next street, me and my sister Julie, Jon and Alice from next door, and Katie. The pecan tree was the tallest tree in the neighborhood. A small bulging brick wall tried and failed to keep the roots off the sidewalk. We combed the area on fall days. Katie could squeeze two pecans together in one hand, cracking them open and handing out the pieces to us kids. The fresh, sweet, surprising pecan feelings are so deeply imprinted in my memories that they immediately engulf me when I taste pecans.

8.13.2024

	A neighborhood developed in a cotton field later resembles a forest
8.14.2024

	Thinking of the tree trunk as both conduit and main support. Living sapwood surrounds inert heartwood. Life happens at the margins on an infrastructure built from its history.
8.15.2024

	Weighty branches on the family tree
8.16.2024

	Takeoff and landing
8.17.2024

8.18.2024

	Phylogons are moments, phylogons are growth stages, phylogons are units of awareness
8.19.2024

	I'm now seeing symbolic trees, the trees of my 1980s drawing experiments, the first personal subject matter that came to me, reemerge in my 2020s, manifest as phylogons, rebuilding my world from the ground up
8.20.2024

	The tree that never had to fight For sun and sky and air and light, But stood out in the open plain And always got its share of rain, Never became a forest king But lived and died a scrubby thing. -excerpt from 'Good Timber' by Douglas Malloch
8.21.2024

	Good timber does not grow with ease: The stronger wind, the stronger trees; The further sky, the greater length; The more the storm, the more the strength. -excerpt from 'Good Timber' by Douglas Malloch
8.22.2024

The reason I remember that poem is because Ernest Story, our scoutmaster, would recite it on campouts, especially ones with bad weather, long hikes, or lots of service hours. He meant to turn around our thinking, to have us appreciate our difficulties as growth opportunities. I saw through that corniness but got caught in the idea that it was not just individual effort, but things no one could change about their environment that also shaped their future.

8.23.2024

	Spent the day running a printmaking workshop at an arts festival
8.24.2024

	Some trees thrive while others struggle
8.25.2024

	Considering trees as complicated, two-way conduits inspires ideas about how phylogons connect
8.26.2024

	Thinking of trees as neurons
8.27.2024

	If the phylogons are connected by trees, can the trees be made of phylogons?
8.28.2024

	A tree doesn't live through the center of the trunk but through vigorous activities at the margins
8.29.2024

	Will it ever be possible to visualize how living things connect?
8.30.2024

	A memory tree emerges next to a church in Nachitoches
8.31.2024