I am an artist and an educator, and my work keeps returning to one question: how do we meet one another? My interest is in relationality in education — learning as something that lives between a learner and a teacher, a child and a place, one person and another.

Martin Buber gave that question a quiet companion in his writing on the tree. We can look at a tree as a picture, a movement, a species, a number — and then, if we let it, we are drawn into relation, and it stops being an It and becomes a Thou. The whole of I and Thou is held in that small moment. Read the passage.

These drawings are my way of staying with that moment. Some are drawn live, sitting with a tree and watching it as it is. Others are drawn from memory, after the meeting, when the tree is no longer in front of me. I don’t think of them as different kinds of work. All of them are a practice of presence: a way of being with a tree, or with the memory of one, without trying to use it, explain it or finish it.

Each tree is drawn by hand, in a different mood and medium, because a tree is never the same tree twice. I am not trying to describe it. I am trying to be there.

In the classroom, as on the page, the deepest learning begins the same way: when we stop treating the other as something to be measured, and allow ourselves to be met.