Ogham Tree Alphabet Series

While searching for shapes to use in abstract painting, I began exploring petroglyphs and prehistoric symbolism. That is when I found the Ogham Tree Alphabet, and I was intrigued. I have always loved trees, and have used trees as my subject for paintings many times.

My ancestors arrived in North America from Ireland, and I was steeped in Irish culture and beliefs. I started the Ogham series in part to connect to my ancestry; in the USA so many of us have never been to the places our ancestors lived, and we have cultural roots that were severed, either deliberately, or because our parents married people of other cultures. My roots span the Atlantic, and because my family kept that tradition alive, I identified as Irish.

When I studied the Ogham Tree Alphabet, with its lines carved into stone, I discovered the trees were unfamiliar to me. We have no Rowan tree, for example. Then I found there are North American relatives or equivalents to the Irish trees, and it lit up something inside. I had a way to weave together my heritage and my native country.

Although I had used geometric shapes in my work many times, I had not incorporated them into representational work before. The more I put them into these semi-representational paintings, the more I began to recognize that they were all curvilinear, and related to the Sacred Feminine.

Many trees are older than most living humans, and I turn to them as a way of drawing on the natural world. I chose colors based on the trees themselves and the colors traditionally associated with them, and have added birds, fungi and symbolic words associated with the tree in question. The series continues to evolve in that way.

I hope anyone who sees these paintings will feel a sense of trust in nature, that humanity is truly part of the immense pageant of life. Pursuing solutions to our problems, we have moved away from nature, forgetting that the answers we seek may already be there, in the cycles and relationships that have sustained life for millennia.

Hawthorn / Huath
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