When we think of non-timber forest products, we tend to think of wild edibles like fiddleheads, or maybe balsam fir needles for the incense market. We certainly don’t think of a forest growing multi-million dollar fine art pieces. And yet that’s exactly what I found a few weeks back while pulling taps in our sugarbush. There I was, mindlessly working along, when I looked up and spied a sculpture so vivid and horrifying that it took my breath away. Local legend in sugarmaking circles around these parts holds that once Johnny Hogan had a hard maple tree in his sugarbush blow over that was straight-through curly, and the butt log – even with the taphole scars – netted him around two grand. After staring dumbly at this sculpture for a while, adjusting my head from time to time for different perspectives, I thought, “Move over, Johnny; your tiger maple’s about to become a footnote.”
I immediately contacted friend and photographer Hi-ya Ki-ya, and soon we were both sitting around the base of the tree, necks craning like two primitives worshiping at the alter of an all-powerful pagan tree-God. A deep booming voice demanded an offering of nitrogen and potassium. I think it was just Hi-ya messing around, but I was in such a weird mental place that my first thought was, “how the hell am I going to find potassium on a Sunday?”
Anyway, the sculpture sits about 40 feet up in the air and seems to be based on Edvard Munch’s classic painting, “The Scream.” As far as homages go, the work is top notch. Rather than rest at simple imitation, this masterpiece evolves the scream concept. Whereas Munch’s screamer had a head like a light bulb, this one has a head like a tree; also, Munch’s rainbow-swirl background was fixed, while this background changes every minute, lending the piece a never-get-stale feel. I also appreciate the artist’s decision to forgo the hands-on-cheeks body language in favor of an arm’s skyward, Halloweeney, “Muwah-ha-ha” pose. It’s much scarier.
As we were sitting there, the sculptor paid his work a visit. He was a short fellow, distinguishable by a smart black tuxedo and a shocking, bright red Mohawk. I yelled to him that Adelaide Tyrol was accepting Outdoor Palette submissions and that his work would be a welcome addition to Northern Woodlands, but all I got were cacophonous squawkings and a raised tail-feather gesture that was both rude and vaguely obscene. As we pondered a deeper meaning, the artist let fly a sluice of glowing white urates all down the front of his masterpiece, a disturbing move that made artist Andres Serrano’s infamous urination submersions of the late 1980s seem tame in comparison.
“Artists,” said Hiya. “They’re such strange birds.” (Though he’d later retract this statement and apologize for sounding judgmental, pointing out that if your surname was Dryocopus and your old man had named you Pileatus, you probably would have grown up to be an eccentric artist, too. Truth be told, they’ve made great strides in the Vermont school system where it comes to name-related bullying – this observation from someone who still remembers the sting of prissy little Penelope Jones’ perversion of my relatively simple surname, an act she accomplished by rubbing the tips of her two index fingers together to simulate kissing while rhetorically wondering if my middle name was “Ro;” this at 11, at a time in a boy’s life when girls and kissing and romance are about as embarrassing as your mother spitting on a napkin and wiping food off your face in public – but in any case, you get the point from this way-too-long segue that in a rural place with a limited ethnic population any name, let alone such a bizarre one, can be hard on a kid and so who are we to judge how anyone turns out.)
When the artist’s unabashed feculence made it apparent that he was way too edgy for our family publication, I immediately morphed into curator mode. Some quick math proved that if, as expected, Munch’s “The Scream” fetches $80 million at auction (an auction being held May 2 in New York City), and this piece is worth half that (a conservative estimate, I’d say), and I was able to secure a 40 percent commission on a sale (we do own the gallery, after all), it would take me about 533,333 years to generate that same kind of money by tapping the tree. When it comes to the question of to tap or not to tap a hard maple, I tend to think landowners overvalue their trees as sawlogs and undervalue them as part of a working sugaring operation, but this is clearly not a case where tapping produces the highest financial return on a tree.
So, I’m having a private art sale. And while I could justify plugging it in more detail in this blog on account of the fact that I’ll undoubtedly donate a substantial portion of the take to the Center for Northern Woodlands Education, it’s still a bit of a conflict of interest. I’ll let you know how it goes.
In the meantime, I’d like to ask any of you out there who have similar oddities in your woods – trees that look like paintings, or boulders that look like your uncle Henry, or whatever you got – to take a picture and send it to us. It would be fun to put together a quirky photo essay of woodland curios like this and run it in a future issue of the magazine. Pictures can be sent to our assistant editor, Meghan Oliver.
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