STORY BY KAREN BOSSICK
PHOTOS COURTESY OF FRIESEN GALLERY
Andria Friesen was waiting at a red light at Main and Sun Valley roads when the words of The Lorax caught her eye.
“Speak for the trees,” said the bumper sticker on the car ahead of her.
By the time the light had turned green, a lightbulb had gone on in Friesen’s head.
It would culminate in a 179-page coffee table book featuring 76 internationally recognized artists, including Yoko Ono, who have had a long-standing love affair with trees. All in the spirit of Dr. Seuss’ fable, in which a mossy creature advises: “Speak for the trees, as the trees have no tongues.”
“I had two choices,” recounted Friesen, who took out a mortgage on her home to pay for the book. “I could say I had an epiphany and I didn’t do anything about it or that I had an epiphany and I did something about it.”
The first bookstore to represent the book when it was published in 2009 was the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. The book inspired an exhibition at Friesen Gallery. And now Andria Friesen wants to give copies of the book to Wood River Valley residents--an acknowledgement of the important role trees play in face of the warming climate and even the COVID-19 pandemic.
All-comers are invited to pick up free books at Friesen Gallery, near the corner of Sun Valley Road and North 1st Avenue in Ketchum, through Dec. 11.
Friesen noted that even Wood River Valley residents spent more time outside during the pandemic, “fed by trees and other plants in a way we hadn’t previously.”
“The pandemic forced more people to be outside in nature where they got to hear the birds and watch the plants grow in a way they never had before, added Friesen Gallery Director Yanna Lantz. “We only have one planet and we only have one chance to protect it and awareness is the first step.”
The book, featuring the works of artists who are able to find “the tongues in trees,” is organized the way trees grow, starting with roots and growing into trunks, branches and finally leaves.
“Some say when they’re in a particular spot, they pick up the book and open to a page and it centers them,” Friesen said.
“It was one of the first gifts Andria gave me when I started working for her and it’s become a daily source of inspiration and optimism for what the world could be—with the caveat that everyone has to do their part,” added Lantz.
The book was inspired in part by opportunities Friesen had to meet with the founders of Esalen institute and with Dorothy Maclean, who founded the Findhorn Foundation, a center for holistic education based on inner listening and co-creation with nature and service.
It features the work of 76 painters, sculptors, photographers, glass and conceptual artists from such places as Ireland, Argentina, London, Canada, Korea and the United States. It included such world-renowned figures as David Hockney, pop-surrealist Mark Ryden and international-environmental artists Christo and Jeanne-Claude.
Everyone Friesen contacted agreed to participate, asking no royalties, because of their passion for the trees.
Friesen had three stipulations:
- That each artist contribute a tree-related artwork they had already composed or that they composed specifically for the book.
- That each offer a written statement or a poem or haiku about what trees mean to them.
- That each contribute words authored by someone else that they found meaningful, whether that someone be Albert Einstein, Henry David Thoreau or even Ogden Nash, who famously wrote, “I think that I shall never see a billboard lovely as a tree. Perhaps unless the billboards fall, I’ll never see a tree at all.”
Yoko Ono, whom Friesen knew from a previous exhibition, said she wanted to write both for her “Wish Tree.”
“Initially, I thought: Well, that’s not the rules. Then, I realized…she is very famous. So okay,” Friesen recounted.
Immediately, other artists clamored: Why does she get to write both when we don’t?
“Finally, I told them, ‘I made a yo-ception.’ And everyone accepted that I had made a wise yo-ception,” Friesen said.
Friesen said she did not even know about Dr. Seuss’s “The Lorax” when she read the bumper sticker. As she researched it, she learned that the Lorax was based on Theodore Roosevelt, spectacles and all, as the man who helped instigate the national park system.
Friesen said the book would be an entirely different book were it titled “Speak About the Trees.” As it is, the book explores the profound relationship humanity has with trees.
“Of all living things trees are the most companionable,” write environmentalist Richard St. Barbe Baker, known as “the man of the trees.”
Gordon Wheeler, president of Esalen Institute, called the book “not just a thing of beauty and reflection but a multimedia tool for deepening our own contemplative practice.”
“We and the trees are connected,” Friesen said. “Gratitude and respect for nature are paramount. If we tuned in and returned to that deeper understanding and sense of unity, how could the world not be a better place?”