The Happy Tree
Around eighteen months ago I began work on an idea called ‘The Happy Tree’. The tree grew out of a series of conversations with Amandine Robaey on the nature of happiness. Thinking about the roots from which happiness springs and of some of the manifestations of happiness, we came up with a long and non-exhaustive list of ‘happies’. Amongst the twenty-five or so that we listed were ‘wrong happy’ (a form of happiness in which what makes you happy might, in the final analysis, not actually be good for you) ‘forbidden happy’ (a happiness looked down upon for some moral reason or other), and ‘overthinking happy’ (which was both a joke about what we were doing in deconstructing the word ‘happy’, and itself a form of happiness: the pursuit of an intellectual purpose).
Having come up with our list of happies, the aim then was to realise these different happies in the form of a tree. My linocut Two Happies was a first attempt to do so. In Two Happies, a blackbird sits upon a sapling and looks across at a branch which forms around the phrase ‘wrong happy’. The sapling contains the phrase ‘forbidden happy’. The two phrases might be paired in warning. The blackbird itself might be nesting, might be guarding, might be defiant. Two boughs run vertically either side of the sapling and act as a frame. As a result, what was initially conceived of as a tree then became in my mind a forest. I see the forest, but I haven’t yet (perhaps never will) made the print.
In the time between cutting Two Happies and now, the tree took a back-seat and bided its time. This is, I think, what ideas do. There are silent voices in all of us that say ‘hold’. They murmur disquiet. They know what we don’t know. The silence is often called ‘block’ or ‘prevarication’. I think of it as process. The sleep of an idea — its long winter.
A month or so ago, the idea woke up. Since then, I have been sketching a lot and now have in mind the tree as a thing in itself, and also as a series of prints which when displayed together take the form of the tree. The studies below are for two possible prints in the series.
‘Melancholy Happy’ is the happiness derived from that which might on the face of it appear sad. (Happiness is relative: it is dependent not only upon degree and context, but also upon personality). The picture I have in my head for this phrase is of fish swimming in a sky that is sea. The idea marries with a poem that I wrote called Awyr / Sky and in which miles high in the sky ‘sleep swifts like guillemots on waves’. The phrase ‘before happy’ is, like the Dutch concept voorpret, a happiness experienced in anticipation of a happy event. Even if the event itself were never to occur, there is still that feeling of the happiness before. In this sense ‘before happy’ (which contains its other:‘happy before’) is much like an idea.
