This week, I discovered a painter who loves trees. I am always looking for artists who love trees. Her imagination ravishes trees.
She painted without schooling.
A fine French director made a movie of her life: Seraphine. It won Yolande Moreau a Best Actress award in France, and won seventeen awards worldwide in 2009. It’s a quiet, unflinching film that gets your hands dirty.
Divinely dirty. Soil is divine.
"Where has the tree gone, that locked earth to the sky?" Philip Larkin asks in his poem "Going." The tree is here.
Seraphine of Senlis and Emily Carr and Georgia O’Keefe. These three followed their inner directives to worship the living earth with paint. How do you worship?
"Can you understand the light among the trees?" Nick Drake asks in "The Way to Blue." Seraphine Louis did.
