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MacQueen’s Quinterly: Knock-your-socks-off Art and Literature
Issue 26: 1 Jan. 2025
Poem: 130 words
By Robbi Nester

The Gray Tree (1911)

Everything is expressed through relationships.
—Piet Mondrian*
When a tree in winter stands alone against a field 
of white and gray bereft of leaves, and the sky 
can barely be distinguished from the ground, 
you can see what’s underneath its spring 
and summer spangles or fall’s showy hues 
to the branches, so like the fretwork of veins 
and bones beneath my human skin. 
This web of light, network of lines and arcs, 
teaches me to see the tree has never 
truly stood alone, although it seemed to. 
Mondrian couldn’t have known how trees 
send signals through tangles of mycelium, 
nourish their saplings, sing to the grass. 
Yet here, we see the world as trees must see it, 
light feathering the air, falling to the frozen earth. 

 

The Gray Tree: 1911 Painting by Piet Mondrian
The Gray Tree (oil on canvas, 1911) by Piet Mondrian

Held by Gemeentemuseum Den Haag, The Hague, the Netherlands.
Image was downloaded from Wikipedia on 23 December 2024:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gray_Tree

 

*Publisher’s Note:

Epigraph by Dutch painter and art theoretician Piet Mondrian (1872–1944), who was among the greatest artists of the 20th century, appears in the Abstract Artist Bio at Vîrtosu Art Gallery:

“Everything is expressed through relationship. Color can exist only through other colors, dimension through other dimensions, position through other positions that oppose them. That is why I regard relationship as the principal thing.”

https://virtosuart.com/index.php/gallery/piet-mondrian (retrieved 12-23-2024)

 

Bio: Robbi Nester

 
 
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