“All you draw are trees”…until I did not draw at all anymore. My portfolio is empty, but the visuals I hold in my mind of big trees filling the sky is a canvas to behold.

Marie Laure
Jul 13
2 min read

As a fifth-grader, I took to heart the words of a classmate, my first crush, Norman, the class artist. He was a natural artist and the Sisters praised his art.

Norman was the first first boy to call me on the phone—not text—and my whole family knew it in real time. My blushing cheeks confirmed he had asked me to the school dance. Fifth grade —- ten-years old! Harmless but memorable.

Yet, sixty years hence, I remember less about the dance then about his critique of my tree drawings, saying in front of the whole class “All you ever draw are trees”! Mortified, I put down the drawing pencil and never picked it up again.

Of course I drew trees—my nearest and dearest friends who cradled me in their large arms when I felt all alone in the world —-a child bereft after losing my beloved father. Trees sustained me as they do every one of us with clean air to breathe and cool shade from blistering sun.

Green trees against an azure blue sky is a painting not even an artist, or Norman, can recreate—though now I know many great artists study and draw and paint trees until the cows come home. Whenever I find myself standing before such a painting in a museum, I hear Norman and think: WRONG! Nothing wrong with only drawing trees.

Capturing beauty and majesty as such is like trying to draw God. It can’t be done but it is worth it just to try.

In fifth grade I also learned the following poem:

I think that I shall never see

A poem lovely as a tree.

A tree whose hungry mouth is prest

Against the earth’s sweet flowing breast;

A tree that looks at God all day,

And lifts her leafy arms to pray;

A tree that may in Summer wear

A nest of robins in her hair;

Upon whose bosom snow has lain;

Who intimately lives with rain.