Tree Lines

By Valerie P Cohen and Michael P. Cohen

Tree Lines unites striking ink drawings of high-altitude pine trees with poetic vignettes about how people interact with mountain environments. The drawings and text work together to form a direct artistic encounter with timberline conifers. The husband and wife team of Valerie and Michael Cohen employ a unique process whereby she draws in isolation, gives him her drawings, and he then writes whatever he’s inspired to create. Neither offers the other any kind of feedback or instruction. The result is an accessible and deeply engaging work that is also extremely well researched; the Cohens bring a lifetime of scholarship in literature, history, and the environment to this work.

The drawings are black-and-white, pen-and-ink representations of high alpine ecosystems. The prose is stripped bare, abbreviated in an epigrammatic style that is poetic and spontaneous. Trees represented here are the Western Juniper or Sierra Juniper, the Limber, and the Bristlecone Pine—three species of long-lived, slow-growing conifers that grow across the Great Basin. While they represent only a small portion of the vegetative culture high in the western mountains, the Cohens use representation as abstraction as is utilized by writers and artists to convey a unique kind of microcosm of our natural environment. This book compares to such classics as Leopold’s A Sand County Almanac, and Berger’s Ways of Seeing, which open up lines of observation, analysis, and art for a new generation of readers. 
 

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of Nevada Press
• Release date: Mar 20, 2017
• ISBN: 9780874174649

Book preview

Authors

Drawings

Great Basin Landscape #3

Sunrise (Sierra Juniper)

Tree Rings

Mean Solar Time

Ghost Bristlecone

Limber Pine #1

Strip Growth (Sierra Juniper)

Spiral Growth

Seedling (Bristlecone Pine)

The Abstract Truth

Campito Mountain: Loud Wind (Bristlecone Pine)

Learning to Lean (Bristlecone Pine)

Inside the Bristlecone

Mercy, Mercy, Mercy (Bristlecone Pine)

Limber Pine #2

Spinal Tap (Puma Skeleton)

Two Trees Dancing

An Unbidden Thought (Bristlecone Pine)

Heartwood (Bristlecone Pine)

11,600 in the Whites

Two Degrees of Separation

Harlequin

True North

You Never Can Tell (Sierra Juniper)

Grace of Melancholy

Wailing Souls (Bristlecone Pines)

Black and Kind of Blue

Bristlecone Bark

Prologue: The Elements

EARTH AIR FIRE WATER. The elements are exacting, arduous, rigorous, do not give, sympathize, or control, oppose each other, resist and consume, construct and deconstruct, create and destroy.

People have always known these forces or materials as abstractions we must live within. The Elements are the environment, constantly and inconstantly changing. No body is in or out of these constituents and forces that surround and inhabit.

The Elements are what any body is when not conscious.

The Elements are not conscious, do not know each other.

Their interactions are accidental.

This is the elementary school. Elementary.

The Elements draw lines, but do not create ways:

timberline, lakeshore, horizon, plumes and grades, boundaries and niches.

One can only imagine a map as a reconciliation of the Elements, confluence or congruence of matter or force, as if a territory of fixed relations, proportionate, mixing earth and air, fire and water, earth and fire, air and water, according to just rules. To do so is to abstract.

Abstraction

ECOLOGISTS sometimes speak of simplified ecosystems at high altitudes. Indeed, dynamics of the world abstract themselves up here. Also, large things are worn away, and the small becomes immense. Those who arrive are tempted to withdraw from worldly affairs, and become ascetic.

Anyone might become drawn away, withdrawn or separated from material objects or practical matters, and as a result might seem difficult to understand, abstruse.

We contend that abstraction is drawn from reality. So that, for instance, a written abstract is an abridgement or summary of a document, with, as Samuel Johnson put it, a general sense of "a smaller quantity containing the virtue or power of a