·:[ Stephen Vincent ]:·
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For the past year I have been looking closely at the trees in my San Francisco neighborhood, including the following ‘micro-photos’ of the plane or Sycamore trees that are sometimes planted along the local sidewalks. Without saying much more, what follows are a diverse sampling of these photos that are yet to be organized into the illusion of a continuous trunk - tho there are parts of this example that do that, where a series of string pictures appear to enfold the landscape, or story, of, at least, a significant part the tree’s growth. Indeed I find it hard to look at the flow, and seeming revelation of obstacles and struggles in the coherence of these marks, without sensing a mirror of both the intimate and public struggles in the life of any individual or community. It’s as if the trees, haptic by haptic mark, are telling us their history, as well as the history of both human life and the scripted marks that shape the making of literature and art.

I know on some level there is something predictive and either allegorically and/or metaphorically familiar about connecting the tree with human life and history and literature and so forth. What I want to think is that there is something unique and fresh about that allegorical or metaphoric connection when we look closely at these marks! Indeed, as I have suggested once before, may there have been a ancient connection between these kinds of marks and the original creation of script as a way of writing the stories of the race. Or, is the seeming appearance of script within the bark just a visual coincidence?