STEPPING OUT

COLLECTOR'S FOCUS LANDSCAPES

- JOHN O'HERN

David Wagoner wrote elegantly about the living forest in his poem Lost. 

Stand still. The trees ahead and bushes beside you 

Are not lost. Wherever you are is called Here,

And you must treat it as a powerful stranger,

Must ask permission to know it and be known.

The forest breathes. Listen. It answers,

I have made this place around you.

If you leave it, you may come back again, saying

Here.

No two trees are the same to Raven.

No two branches are the same to Wren.

If what a tree or a bush does is lost on you,

You are surely lost. Stand still. The forest knows

Where you are. You must let it find you.

Eric Aho speaks of his "purposeful drifting" in a boat on a pond contemplating the forest on the shore and the energetic connection, the "synapse," between them. "Standing before a canvas," he says, "like standing in the woods, as it turns out, is much the same. It takes a moment for the eye to adjust to less light in the forest as much as it does to quiet the mind. Is this what Whitman meant by 'unminding'-to just look without disturbance?"

His 90-by-80-inch canvas, Pond, is composed of rich, broad, gestural brushstrokes that suggest the impenetrable mystery of the forest. Henry Miller wrote, "We live at the edge of the miraculous." The forest invites participation in its mysteries, letting it find you.