Painting: Oil on Canvas

Painted: 2024

Size: 12” x 24”

Owner: In storage

This is not about a tree. This is an internal conflict. This is not a happy little tree. It is bleak and barren. Is it alive or is it dead? Like life, it twists and turns and follows its’ own path. When I was in first grade, my art teacher taught me how to draw a tree. I’ve drawn trees ever since to clear my mind. Seldom are these trees full of life. Singular trees have a special meaning to me.

When I was in my teens, my family moved to a boom town. A boom town is a small community where a large construction project was being built. In a boom town there are lots of people with lots of money and no place to spend it. Soon, the entrepreneurs brought entertainment meant to separate lonely men from their eccess wealth. These forms of entertainment were women, gambling, and drugs. Underage drinking was rampant. Access to marijuana was easy. Hundreds of board teenagers would meet in the park and share in these illegal confections. I was wide-eyed and innocent at first, but soon became a fixture there. You didn’t need money to expand your mind. There was always someone willing to get the party started. With what I thought was a good time, my friends and acquaintances began dying. A few were stoned out of their minds and died in tragic accidents, but others took their own lives. I thought I had put those memories in my past, but occasionally they come back in all their ugliness.

Recently, I learned my oldest son was suffering from PTSD and depression.  He was a soldier in Afghanistan and Iraq. Learning of his depression triggered an old memory from my misspent youth. This is that memory. A friend’s sister came by and picked me up on an ordinary summer’s evening. She was distraught because she had found her brother’s suicide note in his sock drawer, so we drove around town trying to find her brother, and we eventually found him at the high school alumni dance. He was so wasted he could barely walk. I went in and coaxed him back to her car. I asked him, “What’s up with the note?” He waved his hand and said, “It is nothing. I’m just going out of town for a few days. That’s all! No big deal.”  I left him with his sister and walked home because I had to get up early the next day. She drove her brother to her house where several close friends had gathered to watch him. The vigil turned into a party as it usually did, and my friend reveled in that celebration and was in good spirits. The next day he told everyone he was fine, and all those there said he was unusually at peace with the world. He drove to a bridge that crossed a raging river, jumped and ended his life. I found out that afternoon and my world changed forever. If only I had seen the signs…

The lone trees that I paint are representative of my hard nature. I stand rooted and unmoving in my beliefs. It was the way I was raised. It is the way I will always be. There is only one painting of a tree that is an exception and that painting is God’s-Stained Glass. That painting is from my childhood when I would lay upon by back and look at the sky through the leaves of a tree. It was a taste of innocence that I still cling to. The other paintings of trees are my exposed wounds. Just when you think the wounds are healed, something rips off the scab and the wound once again begins to ooze. In a few days the stench of the past goes away, but not before I draw one more tree.