Marquand Books, Inc., Seattle
www.marquand.com
Through the symbolic imagery of trees, seventy-six visual artists illustrate the vital interconnectedness of man and nature in Andria Friesen’s Speak for the Trees. Friesen, who operates galleries in Seattle and Sun Valley, describes her inspiration for the book as a seemingly ubiquitous event, waiting for a traffic signal turn change. She then noticed the bumper sticker on a truck that read, “Speak for the Trees,” and “in an instant the idea for this book in all its complexity came to me.” An instant that, in actuality, was years in the making. Friesen had unknowingly sown the seeds, so to speak, for this project through her travels, ranging from Idaho and California to Scotland, and encounters; including meeting with Michael Murphy, co-founder of the Esalen Institute, and Dorothy Maclean, founding member of the Findhorn Foundation, who also contributed a prelude for the text.
Arranged in ascending order, roots to branches or earth to sky, Friesen’s Trees is a simultaneous metaphor of the evanescent and the eternal. Emerging artists and veteran talent, including David Hockney, Mark Ryden and Yoko Ono, have come together to lend voice through their work and selected writings that have inspired their own journey. Katie Holten’s sculptural dogwood made of man-made materials–cardboard, newspaper, PVC, steel, wire, and the ever-essential ductape–illustrates the complex circulatory network of vein-like roots usually hidden from view. Steve Jensen also explored the usually hidden substructure. After encountering a series of dead trees, Jensen realized the renewed potential of a shifted perspective, and replanted them–upside down–allowing the roots to aspire to the condition of branches. Maclean writes in her Offering to Trees of the spiritual comfort and “balancing quality” inherent they possess; Linda Vallejo’s pulsating painting Electric Oak: Full Moon in Daylight and Paul Heussenstann’s Gateway to Enlightenment evoke a similar sense of transcendentalism.
The timing is poignant. Artist Michael Brophy’s painting of the bi-product of deforstation and accompanying text, “whole hillsides clear-cut, the slash heaps drying in the sun…” speak for the trees that once were. The ghostly landscape of Long Bach Nguyen’s photograph, Sea of Trees, seem almost frozen in a moment of ecological precariousness, as if gauging the direction of the turning ecological tide. The production of this book takes into account such concerns. The full-color illustrations–each artist is given a two-page spread–were created using soy-based inks and the overall production of the book earned a seal of approval from the Forest Stewardship Council (FSC).