corvi

Once upon a time juli and I were traveling in Siberia, with visas that were either about to expire, or had just expired. It was early autumn, with soft warm days and clear cold nights with sharp stars. We were rushing to the border, trying to exist Russia while we were still legal, along the rocky shores of Lake Baikal. It was about two hours after sunset, but the horizon was still aglow with green.

Lake Baikal is a rift lake - a deep crack in the Earth's crust that contains over twenty percent of the earth's fresh water. We could not see, at night, how blue and clear and how deep it was, but it still felt uncanny, this dark quiet space off one side of the car, where everything fell away.

And suddenly there was the apparition of a tree along the rocky shore, broken wind-twisted, with blue prayer scarves tied along the branches. And we sped on toward the awaiting border paperwork nightmare, and it was gone.

That tree haunts me.  At least once a year I make an attempt to depict it. (Here's an earlier one)

Here's the most recent:



It is a sheet of white paper cut with holes, layered over a sheet of black paper with holes, layered over a solid sheet of blue paper. 

In some ways, this is the perfect artistic motif to be obsessed with. I had only the one glance of it. I have no way to tell whether I'm doing it wrong, no way to obsess over the placement of every sheet of bark. Just the dream-dark memory of the wind-bent arch against the spill of twilight and the dark of the rift lake.

I entered this piece in the island's Fall Fair, and won first place in the hobby arts category. I think I won because the judges had no idea you could do this with paper.  (There were a lot of oil paintings that I'm pretty sure took both more skill and more time.) I've never won an art prize before! I get a trophy!

And then someone at the fair bought it! So now I can make another one without anyone realizing how obsessed with this one tree glimpsed for five seconds and 100 kilometers an hour from a highway in Siberia I am.