JOHN CLARKE

My Arms Reach Up to Heaven

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I don’t consider myself a landscape photographer. That being said, I find I take more pictures of the natural world than anything else. I think there are two reasons for this. The first is that I am very pragmatic when it comes to taking pictures, and so, living amidst the beauty of the Berkshire hills in western MA, I take a lot of pictures of what I see all the time. I’m drawn to beauty, and so often, the landscape around me is beautiful, so I shoot it. The second is my love of trees. This love affair is a bit more esoteric. I’m captivated by the up-reaching, endlessly branching aspect of trees. This is a spiritual thing as much as anything else. I see in trees what I often feel… a yearning to reach upward and outward, sending off as many branches as possible to increase the odds that one might take hold and rise. When I’m drawing, I often feel like a tree… like the emotional content I am trying to express has the shape of a tree. Upward. Always upward.

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The trees in autumn in New England have their obvious draw, but underlying that, when trees lose their leaves and reveal their branching structure, the landscape opens up, and a thin layer of the world becomes shattered into stained glass fragments of sky and muted color. Aside from the riot of October yellows, reds and golds, there are few things as beautiful as the russets, rusts and ochres that blend and hum in the late November hills.