Malinda Words: Meditation on tree-art

['The Morning Inspection' is the title of a column I wrote for the Daily News from 2009 to 2011, one article a day, Monday through Saturday. This is the 200th article in the new series that began in December 2022. Links to previous articles are given below]

All things natural, one may argue, are works of art. Of course if one were to go with the formal definition of art, you would have to throw that one out. A waterfall, a valley swept with flowers of exquisite colour, mist-laden mountains, cloud formations and a rainbow are certainly not ‘expressions or applications of human creative skill and imagination, typically in a visual form such as painting or sculpture, producing works to be appreciated primarily for their beauty or emotional power.’

We can however submit poetic license, plead a case for the use of metaphor and insist, ‘all things natural are indeed works of art.’

This is about ‘tree art’ of which there can be many forms if one were to stretch definitions a little. A few decades ago, for example, there was quite a devotional rush when someone discovered ‘deva roopa’ or god-like figures materialised on a bo tree in Kuliyapitiya. I remember visiting the place and noticing the lucrative commerce that was taking place around the particular temple. I was one of at least a hundred visitors that day and I was told that there had been several times that number on certain days.

Beauty is in the eyes of the beholder. God too, at least in this case. Look hard enough and you can see all kinds of things on tree trunks. You can be convinced that the clouds above look like a dog or a temple or anything you like.

So it wasn’t tree-art. It was eye-art. Human creativity and imagination doing its work. Overtime, one might add.

But there’s a different kind of tree art, the kind where the artist sees a piece of driftwood, a branch of a tree or some peculiarity at a fork, imagines what it could be made to look like and proceeds to work his or her magic. They turn out all kinds of fascinating images, these artists. Tree-art and tree-artists.

Then there’s the tree art of those who extract tree-detail using a camera and offering incredible black and white images. And then there’s the tree art of Gamini Abeykoon.

I could stop here. I invite the reader to consider his line art and let the imagination fill in colour gaps, flesh-in contexts and histories, project futures of inevitability, and meditate on the eternal verities, the jati, jara and marana of all things, trees, tree-art, tree-artists, connoisseurs of tree-art and the thoughts birthed in mind and feelings burnt on heart thereafter.

And now, if so inclined, here is what Gamini Aiya’s tree-art inscribed on me:

Innumerability. There are no full stops, but there are other punctuation marks. There’s comma, colon, semi-colon, exclamation and query. There is no beginning one can put a finger on. There is no end point one can visualise. There’s rise and fall. Birth and decay. Triumphs that journey towards defeat. The barren that will not forbid seed and seed that mark presence as sapling. Competition among foliage. A search for the sky, the consolation of canopy, coexistence with parasites and the elemental love-hate.

Questions. What conversations took place between leaves fallen and yet to fall and are they repeated again and again by other leaves, those yet to fall and those that have returned to the primordial mother, earth? Do leaves always sing in chorus or is it that our ears are too dull to discern each distinctive voice? Is our ability to see colour actually a handicap that forbids us from extracting black and white in the fullness of detail and depth?

More questions. Did the photographer ‘see’ what was before the camera as a collage of nature’s deliberate choice of colour or in just two of them, black and white? If indeed the unknown photographer offered it in black and white, could Gamini Aiya or anyone else, you and I included, restore at least in the mind the lost or robbed colours?

Gamini Aiya has placed a signature in the bottom left corner of the painting. He is an artist. He has transcribed beautifully as has whoever clicked a camera on a particular day, at a particular time, from a particular distance and at a particular angle. Are they the only two artists here?

The seasons, rains, winds, the sun and the slow but inevitable movement yielded by the battle between roots and soil, the foot that crushed, killed or delayed the growth of a sapling or weakened a seed, the foot that fell elsewhere, insects, birds and other creatures that took or left behind in ways and volumes — how can we say that none of them caressed, grasped and in other ways helped produce this particular mix of line, curve and space?

And we, all of us who set eyes on this image and you who happen to be reading this — aren’t we all capable of painting meaning into these lines, privileging that single leaf or this particular tribe of foliage?

Don’t we, in the manner described above, make a community of tree-artists producing ruk-kala that few might acknowledge and fewer still will attribute to any of all of us?

21 August 2023

Meditation on tree-art

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