Reverie and reckoning with our relationship to nature between the branches and the birds.
Ever since we climbed down from the trees, we have been looking up to them to understand ourselves and our place in the universe. “Nothing is holier, nothing is more exemplary than a beautiful, strong tree,” Hermann Hesse wrote a century ago in his sublime sylvan love letter, affirming that “when we have learned how to listen to trees, then the brevity and the quickness and the childlike hastiness of our thoughts achieve an incomparable joy.”
Centuries, millennia before Hesse — before Wangari Maathai won the Nobel Prize for her courageously enacted conviction that “a tree is a little bit of the future,” before scientists uncovered the astonishing language of trees, before Western artists saw in tree silhouettes a Rorschach test for what we are — the indigenous artists and storytellers of the Gond tribe in central India have been reverencing the secret lives of trees as portals into the inner life of nature, into the wildness of our own nature, into a supra-natural universe of myth and magic.
A decade after the Indian artisan community and independent publisher Tara Books created the astonishing handmade masterpiece The Night Life of Trees — intricate portraits of tree-spirits based on ancient Gond mythology, painted by three of the most celebrated living Gond artists and silk-screened by hand using traditional Indian dyes — these wondrous sylvan visions come ablaze anew in a set of black-and-white prints, consummately detailed and alive, silk-screened on handmade paper made of locally sourced cotton waste.
The prints, like everything Tara Books make, support their community of artists, craftspeople, and storytellers, some of whom are illiterate, many self-taught, most women, and all devoted to the preservation and celebration of the ancient folk art traditions that have rooted numberless generations into a reverence of the natural world and our relationship with it.
Leap across epochs and cultures to complement these visual venerations with Mary Oliver’s prayerful tree poem and Pablo Neruda’s prose serenade to the forest, then revisit other treasures from Tara Books: Sun and Moon, a collection of Indian celestial myths illustrated by ten of the country’s finest indigenous artists; Creation, a visual cosmogony of origin myths by one of the Gond artists behind The Night Life of Trees; Waterlife, an exquisite illustrated encyclopedia of marine creatures from Indian folklore; Beasts of India, a bestiary of indigenous animals depicted in various tribal traditions; and the boundlessly gladsome Hope Is a Girl Selling Fruit.
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