If these trees could talk: Jay DeFeo’s Trees on exhibition at the Laguna Art Museum
By MARRIE STONE
Photos by Jeff Rovner
When Richard Powers wrote his 2018 Pulitzer Prize winning eco-novel The Overstory, he lived not far from Berkeley, where renowned mid-century artist Jay DeFeo spent the bulk of her life and career. Powers sat in the shadow of Santa Cruz’s redwood forest and at the center of Silicon Valley, where an unprecedented tech race was underway outside his door.
“To one side of me was one of the greatest concentrations of wealth and technological might in history. To the other side were the Santa Cruz mountains, covered in redwoods,” Powers told Chicago Review of Books after the novel’s release. “These were the forests that had been clear-cut to build San Francisco, and it seemed to me that they had grown back wonderfully. But one day, I came across a single tree that had, for whatever reason, escaped the loggers. It was the width of a house, the length of a football field, and as old as Jesus or Caesar. Compared to the trees that had so impressed me, it was like Jupiter is to the Earth.”
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“Untitled” (Tree series) 1954, tempera on paper by Jay DeFeo
Powers began to imagine what those redwood forests must have looked like before deforestation took them down, realizing they likely would not return for centuries, if ever. “It seemed to me that we had been at war for a long time – trees and people – and I wondered if it might be possible for things ever to go any other way. Within a few months, I quit my job at Stanford and devoted myself full time to writing The Overstory.”
Roughly 65 years before The Overstory hit bookshelves, Bay Area artist DeFeo had begun her Tree series. All nine surviving tree images are now together and on display, along with more than a dozen of DeFeo’s gelatin silver prints, at the Laguna Art Museum (LAM) as part of their annual Art & Nature exhibition through January 12, 2025.
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“Untitled” (Tree series) 1953, tempera on paper by Jay DeFeo
Although DeFeo’s inspirations and motivations may have differed from Powers’, they shared the same reverence for our natural world. DeFeo spent much of her career rendering trees, flowers and plants to paper. After studying in Europe and North Africa for more than a year when she completed her studies at UC Berkeley, she returned to the Bay Area in 1953 and began the series. She seemed ahead of her time in recycling the materials she used in creating her subject matter.
Experimenting across a variety of mediums including graphite, ink, tempera, and oil, DeFeo even incorporated packing tape into some of her Tree drawings. She preferred working on paper, as opposed to canvas, and wasn’t always discerning in her materials, often using anything she could get her hands on, including butcher paper torn from a roll, paper bags and notebook paper. As Powers wrote in The Overstory, “What you make from a tree should be at least as miraculous as what you cut down.”
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“Untitled” (Tree series) 1953, tempera and oil with collage on paper by Jay DeFeo
Moved, in part, by her enthusiasm for Christmas and all its accoutrements, but particularly the trees, DeFeo engaged in a lifelong romance with the holiday. She typically procured a Christmas tree early and kept it well past its expiration date (typically into spring).
“I had sort of a thing about Christmas trees. I saved them all. As years went by – we had so much space in those days that I could just afford these little indulgences. So, I always kept the trees aside in a little extra room,” DeFeo once said during a 1979 lecture in Oakland, Calif.
As LAM Curatorial Fellow Rochelle Steiner noted in her essay “Beyond the Window: Jay DeFeo’s Trees”: “Archival photos reveal trees defoliated to the point that only the central vertical stem and some horizontal stick-like branches remain, in some cases repurposed functionally as a coat or hat rack.”
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(L-R) LAM Curatorial Fellow and Guest Curator Rochelle Steiner with Executive Director of the Jay DeFeo Foundation Leah Levy standing with DeFeo’s “Untitled (Florence)” 1952 (oil on canvas)
DeFeo’s Tree series may have laid the groundwork for the magnum opus of her career, an eight-year obsession that began in her Berkeley studio in 1958 and wasn’t completed until 1966. At nearly 11 by 8 feet, and almost a foot deep, The Rose weighed in at 2,300 pounds of paint. It’s now part of the Whitney Museum’s permanent collection.
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DeFeo returned once again to her trees in the early 1970s, this time as a photographer, capturing the majestic varieties in black and white gelatin silver prints. Her career proved more circular than linear as she often hung decades-old work around her studio as inspiration and revisited similar subject matter across time.
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“Untitled” 1972, gelatin silver print by Jay DeFeo
DeFeo died in 1989, at age 60, of lung cancer. And while she achieved some notoriety during her lifetime, significant recognition has occurred posthumously as her work has been collected worldwide by such notable museums as the Tate Modern, Centre Pompidou, The Museum of Modern Art, Whitney Museum of American Art, the Getty, the Hammer, the Norton Simon and LAM, to name just a few.
As always, there is the work as it’s created and the work as it’s experienced. Since DeFeo’s death 35 years ago, the climate has fallen into an ever-deepening crisis. Her Tree series might be viewed very differently today than when she created those drawings in the early 1950s. Back then, we were still at least a decade away from beginning to appreciate the impact humans were having on the planet. Trees could be enjoyed without any encoded messaging. Today, it’s difficult to unsee their destruction.
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“Untitled” 1972, gelatin silver print by Jay DeFeo
From The Overstory: “This is not our world with trees in it. It’s a world of trees, where humans have just arrived.”
Jay DeFeo’s Trees is on display at LAM through January 12, 2025. For more information, visit their website here.
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(L-R) Leah Levy, LAM Director Julie Perlin Lee and Rochelle Steiner at the exhibit’s opening last Sunday, Sept. 22
