“The numerous drawings of a single tree are at once viscerally tough and virtually spiritual. The drawings yoked with the commentaries are nearly Talmudic: so many ways of interpreting the same ‘text.’”
—Howard N. Fox, emeritus curator of contemporary art, Los Angeles County Museum of Art
The Camperdown Elm
Spuyten Duyvil, 2017
Paperback | $30
8-1/2 x 8-1/2 inches | 98pp
ISBN 978-1-944682-39-2
Order from Spuyten Duyvil Press
What do you see when you look at an old gnarled tree? Fifty years ago Marianne Moore called the endlessly surprising Camperdown Elm of Prospect Park “our crowning curio.” Today it still brings passers-by to a halt, initiating many of them into the act of seeing.
Drawing vastly increases how much one sees, and to that end I set about drawing the Camperdown Elm. In my view drawing and writing nourish each other, while trees provide a place where they meet and articulate the structures they have in common.
In The Camperdown Elm two modes of thinking with hand and pen/pencil converse, about the layers upon layers of response to the world that we and the trees embody, less differently than one might think.
