Artists + Oak Trees

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Artist Joseph Beuys planting a tree. “I believe that planting these oaks is necessary, not only in biospheric terms, that is to say, in the context of matter and ecology, but in that it will raise ecological consciousness –raise it increas- ingly, in the course of the years to come, because we shall never stop planting.”

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In 1968, Yoko Ono and John Lennon started their “Peace Acorn” project. They placed two acorns in small round cases and sent one to 123 world leaders with a letter that read: “Enclosed in this package we are sending you two living sculptures—which are acorns—in the hope that you will plant them in your garden and grow two oak trees for world peace. Yours with love, John and Yoko Ono Lennon.”

Gustave Courbet, The Oak of Flagey, 1864

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Rodney Graham, Welsh Oaks #1, 1998

Graham, an artist from Vancouver who works in a variety of mediums, built a giant pinhole camera and parked it in front of twelve different trees for one month in 1979. The public was invited to enter the camera to view the luminous image of the tree cast upside-down on the camera's back wall. In the early 1990s he again approached the subject, this time photographing ancient oaks in the English countryside. Inverted on gallery walls, the impressively large prints suspended the trees as if in the mind while insistently recalling the constructed aspect of all artistic representation.
In 1998 Graham produced his definitive work on this theme, a series of seven monumental images of Welsh oaks printed on color paper to produce warm deep sepia and charcoal hues. The almost hallucinatory transformation wrought by the inversion of these images is profound, as disorienting as if the ground were to become transparent, branches become roots, and the sky fall.