Tree Sightings
Study of a Tree, Fra Bartolommeo della Porta (1472 – 1517). Black chalk on antique laid paper, Harvard Art Museums.
Ale Nodarse June 27, 2024
“Beauty: a fruit at which we look without trying to seize.” - Simone Weil.¹
When did you last look at a leaf? At a branch and the fruit set forth? At the stripped peel of a birch or the downward swoop of a willow?
Seldom are those senses which ground us used to their fullest. Writing on the limitations of sense, philosopher Luce Irigaray turns to trees. “Instead of lingering before a tree […] to contemplate its singularity and meet it in its reality, we pass it, at best thinking: it is an oak.”² Often, she continues, we “meet a tree only through a denomination, an idea, a use […].”³ We tend to name things before we see, really see, them. This haste entails a loss for vision. Since in rushing to name, we renounce “both a great part of our present sight and the energy that an encounter between living beings can procure.”⁴ Naming, in other words, reduces vision to categorization and, most often, to values measured by use alone. This entails a set of misconceptions. For the tree (even if we might use it) does not exist for our use. For this birch (which allows us to breathe) does not live for us. Not exactly.
Could we look then, really look, without naming? Drawing, I think, might come to our aid. “Drawing”, by its nature, is a process, the ‘ing’ always underway. Its origins speak to frictions. “To draw” comes from the Proto-Germanic dragan, a “dragging” movement through. It speaks to pulling and to pressing and to the force required to leave a mark. Picture, for instance, a pencil — whose graphite tip presses against paper and disintegrates into it. Or imagine stepping upon still-wet grass and bending a path through tender blades. Friction is always and essentially reciprocal. The paper against pencil, the grass against foot. To look through drawing is to let friction in, to be burdened by vision, to let sight affect us: to not name so quickly. Or to name, knowing this is not enough.
“ Rarely had it been glimpsed as a portrait, as something disposed to interiority — that is, as capable of a strange and other life.”
A drawing of a tree functions to remind us of the strangeness of that creature — living, standing — on the other side of our vision. In the late fifteenth-century, a Florentine monk set black chalk to paper and began to draw. The monk, Fra Bartolommeo della Porta, set his gaze upon trunk and branches, and allowed them to spill, with a slight shift of the hand, into clouds of leaves. Gaps, patches of page, make room for light which in turn seems to flow in as if momentarily accompanied by air. Chalk, when taken up more firmly, also signals the force of outward shoots, as if newly unfurled, while gentle curves augur future growth.
The field of vision is necessarily limited. We cannot know precisely what Bartolommeo saw, nor fathom the distance between his vision and that which still remains upon the page. Asserting his motivations would be more dubious still. Perhaps, in the friar’s case, a sense of divinity within the natural world, as increasingly asserted by mystics and saints, promised aesthetic compunction. Perhaps. We do know, however, that turning to the tree as such had rarely been done before. Far from the subject of vision’s focus, the tree had been presented as landscape. It had almost always stood in accompaniment. Rarely had it been glimpsed as a portrait, as something disposed to interiority — that is, as capable of a strange and other life.
Now Bartolommeo really looked. He saw through branch to chalk and back again. And what he saw seemed to be more than enough. The beauty of such a drawing remains, in part, with its partiality: not in the sense of a bias, but in its disposition as seemingly fragmentary and unfinished and thus alive in the present. (Its beauty serves to remind us that this tree, much like the paper upon which it is set, may well outlive its draftsman.) Drawing, as vision’s friction, acknowledges the tree as presence. The Study of a Tree opens up a new horizon, conditioning a space for reflection and raising questions. Might we permit ourselves, the drawing asks, “not to grasp but to be touched by the sight of a birch?”⁵
¹Simone Weil, Gravity and Grace, 150.
²Luce Irigaray, Through Vegetable Being, 46.
³Ibid
⁴Ibid
⁵ Irigaray, 51
Alejandro (Ale) Nodarse Jammal is an artist and art historian. They are a Ph.D. Candidate in History of Art & Architecture at Harvard University and are completing an MFA at Oxford’s Ruskin School of Art. They think often about art — its history and its practice — in relationship to observation, memory, language, and ethics.
