enchanted forests and tree art

You might say this art is tree-mendous!

Forests and trees have been featured in stories, fairytales, settings for plays.  Artists are inspired by the world around them. Let's explore trees and forests through the eyes of artists.

Contemporary artist Trenton Doyle Hancock created a forest of fabric trees as the scenery for the Austin Ballet Company.  For a short time, this same tree mural was later installed at our Contemporary Art Museum in St. Louis.

Trenton creates large tangled forests and gnarled tree artworks filled with line and pattern.  This massive tree, almost is like a maze that Trenton wants you to find your way out of the puzzle.  The word Legends wraps around the tree sending a message of power and hope.

During the first Spring of the pandemic, like most people who were staying home, English artist David Hockney looked to his surroundings and garden for inspiration.  

Can you tell what inspired his work?  David creates in many mediums and these artworks were made on an Ipad.  

Over several years, Piet Mondrian did many studies of trees and over time trying to use as few lines as possible.  

With only lines, we still recognize the drawings and paintings as trees.

Piet Mondrian – Horizontal Tree, 1911

Evening; Red Tree (1908-1910) by Piet Mondrian


Brazilian photographer and filmmaker Vitor Schietti waits patiently to capture a photo of a light filled tree.  

As twilight fills the sky, Vitor sets up his camera and snaps photos of the branches and the tree canopy filled with light from LED lights and fireworks.

These sculptural trees look like they were cut down from the forest.  They are actual branches, roots and the bark of real trees. 

 Ai Weiwei gathered tree parts from his homeland of China.   The pieces and parts of different trees are reconstructed to create one tree. What does reconstructed mean? In China parts of a tree are sold at markets as a decorative item to be displayed in the home.  

Egon Schiele's trees seem to each be going through the growing seasons.  Imagine how a tree looks in Spring, Summer, Fall and Winter.

Four Trees (1917) by Egon Schiele

Grandma Moses, an untrained artist, capture trees at various season in her folk art paintings.  What season is painted in this artwork?  Grandma Moses gave us clues that might tell you what type of trees these are. Do you know?

Some artists show the entire tree from roots, trunk and canopy and others zoom in.  What clues tell you Van Gogh painted an Almond Tree?

Almond Blossoms (1890) by Vincent van Gogh

Lee Gil-rae's "Millennium ― Old Pine Tree 2019-3," left, and Jeong Hong-rae's 18th century painting "Scholars with a Pine Tree"

Korean artist Lee Gil Rae uses nature as his source of inspiration to craft intricate tree-form sculptures from steel and copper. He says his art is in response to deforestation and environment.  

Avenue of Schloss Kammer Park (1912) by Gustav Klimt

Gustav Klimt painted both of these tree artworks but he also painted this tree...

Tree of Life was painted first as a study for a mosaic that fills a dining room wall in a palace in Belgium. The Tree of Life represents wisdom, protection, strength, and beauty. It reaches up into the sky and down into the earth.

Quietly raise your hand when you know where this Silver Tree sculpture is located?

Roxy Paine has created several version of stainless steel trees.  Roxy wants the silvery branching sculpture to show her care about the environment.

Will you create art inspired by nature?

Will trees inspire your work?

El Anatsui-- turning waste into art

El Anatsui

El Anatsui (born 1944) is a sculptor from Ghana.  He has spent much of his career in Nigeria (a country in West Africa) where he is an artist and professor at a local college.

He has recently become popular around the world for his recycled "bottle-top installations".  

Inspired by the growing waste from things humans use  such as metal cans and bottle tops.  West Africa, where El Anatsui lives, has limited recycling technology.  Think about in what ways you notice waste around us at school, our home, our city, our country.

His materials are gathered from recycling stations and sewn together with copper wire, which are then transformed into metallic cloth-like wall sculptures resembling large pieces of shiny fabric.

“Individually, caps don’t have much to say but together they have a voice.” 

Such materials, while seemingly stiff and sturdy, are actually free and flexible, which often helps with manipulation when installing his sculptures.

His art makes us think about "...consumption-the things we use, the garbage we create, and the environment".

In his studio, he works with teams of assistants--sometimes as many as 40-50 at a time-- to crush, crumple, twist, flatten, bend and fold these discarded items and then thread and bind them with copper wire.

Often times when artist start to become famous, they have to get help completing pieces. They can’t keep up with the demand of their work and need others to help execute their vision.  

Once his art arrives at a museum, El Anatsui allows the museum to decide how to hang these large metal artworks.  Usually they look similar to this. 

Maybe you will get a chance to visit the art of El Anatsui here in our St. Louis Art Museum.  The St. Louis Art Museum is in Forest Park. One of the best parts is that it's free to see all the art on exhibit.

Will your art help bring attention to the amount of waste people and companies make?

Will you use recycled materials in your art?

Will you work with metal to create your idea?

Your Turn

Maybe you will create with wire and bottle caps.  Use a hand drill to make holes in the cap (use cardboard or your art book underneath what you are drilling).   Wire cutters to cut and pliers to bend the wire.

Or maybe you will work with metal by embossing metal with metal tools. Metal tooling, also called “repousse” and “metal embossing” is a type of low-relief sculpture in which tools are used to create a design on metal.  

Center a piece of cardboard onto a sheet of metal.  Carefully fold over all 4 sides and press 

Use popsicle sticks and wooden stylus to emboss aluminum 

add color with Sharpie.  

Metal is not porous.  The ink will not soak in and dry like it does on paper so a permanent marker is the right tool for the job.

CAUTION.  METAL Edges are SHARP!