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MICROSTORY OF ART

MICROSTORY OF ART
ONLINE JOURNAL FOR ART, CONNOISSEURSHIP AND CULTURAL JOURNALISM

Dedicated to Cherry Orchards

(Picture: all pictures by DS; this is called Landscape with a Cherry Orchard)

Cherry Orchard

(1.7.2023) When I was a child my one grandfather impressed me by dedicating one small cherry tree of his garden to me. ›This is now your tree‹, he said, but alas, we did leave the country, the garden got sold, and I don’t even know if this particular tree still does exist. So what I am going to do now is to envision my own cherry orchard. This undertaking is partly inspired by Chekhov, but only indirectly. Since Chekhov does yet name the cherry orchard in his play The Cherry Orchard, and all the figures in his play do know the cherry orchard. But no one inspects it, no one sees it or describes its present state, and no one seems to be drawn even to see it. It is only a name that Chekhov has resonate with memories, a name that everybody in that play fills with his own ideas about a cherry orchard, as does the reader or viewer of that play. The orchard must be huge, it is named in an encyclopedia, there are poplars near it – that’s it. And if I am envsioning my own cherry orchard – by doing my own drawings of it – I am drawing on having inspected numerous orchards in my region. Actually I did embark on doing a visual essay by means of photography; but instead I am doing a visual essay now by means of drawings (with two photographs added).

Economically the cultivation of Christmas trees seems to be more on the rise than cherry trees, but one could be mistaken. The cherry orchard is a classic, and one does observe the combination with horse breeding, but also with an observatory in our region (close to that observatory also a vintage plane, perhaps from World War II, is to be located). Many trees seem not to be in very good shape, although it is said that the cherry tree likes it dry. The recent drought, perhaps, was too much. Several orchards in our region one would probably find in an encyclopedia, at least the one which is cultivating the old types of fruits and serves as a kind of archive.

I am tempted to say that more truth is in my drawings of my imaginary cherry orchard than is in the two photographs; and I have deliberately made the two photographs more artificially looking (and to one I have given a retro-look in sepia; this one is an orchard also with, but not exclusively with cherry trees, and it is to be located near the place where I grew up (for most of the time). The panoramic photograph shows the Fata Morgana of a fruit orchard, suddenly appearing in a landscape.

I like orchards that have the character of gardens more than the plantation type of orchards, and this might have to do something with my aforementioned memories and associations. Hence I have, without much reflection, also drawn various figures contemplating gardens/orchards; and the vision has more personal truth than any accurate rendering (which would be, on some level, more easy to do). Personally I don’t need visions to become true; I am satisfied with the inner vision that also might be in need of cultivation, and we’ll see what will come out of this in the near future (all drawings done today, 1 July 2023, except the one in color, which was done earlier).