Poster Image
$20
Item#: 2018SYR05
Purchase Details
11x17-inches, printed on heavy weight (100-pound) Hammermill cover paper. We package each print with a piece of chipboard in a clear plastic sleeve.
You also receive…
An information page with photos of the artist and poet, and hand-written comments from each.
Medium- and large-format posters are available by custom order. Contact us for details.
A Spring Breeze Still Cold
poster information
Description
A spring breeze still cold
All nerves beneath the black oak
A new leaf unfurls
Moving through the poem line by line, I guess I could say that I live in the Westcott neighborhood, and I walk quite a bit. Walking in the spring I often notice that there's a kind of chilly breeze. You're walking around and somehow the overall temperature gets warm, but the wind's still cold.
As to the second and third lines, there are all of these books about how tree roots have ways of speaking to each other through the soil, and I like the idea of the nerves within the tree, but also the ambiguity with the person walking past them. We're always waiting for that moment for spring to begin; a leaf coming out, one little bud, it's going to happen at some point.
I chose this haiku because I feel like it speaks to the kind of person I am, or at least the kind of tonality that I like to illustrate in my work. I really enjoy drawing trees, life, and images of nature. A lot of the work I do is in pen and ink, and a lot of natural structures—branches, roots, and trunks—do very well in pen and ink. I feel like the complexity of the roots is visually similar to cardiac vessels or streams running through hills. It's just the way the line moves between, like if you're following a river downstream, or if you're following a tree branch from a trunk's base—it's very similar. Whatever is causing that similarity is what I try to get at, not just visually, but emotionally.