Mike,
I must confess that when I first seen your carved Olive, I despised it, I hated it, I thought it violated my senses and was an insult to bonsai and the artists who create them, but I never dismissed it.
It stuck inside my mind like an open faced roast beef sandwich sticks inside your stomach. The image gnawed at me, I would see it in other forms, in other venues, it haunted me and I kept coming back to it because I couldn't wrap my tightly bound, sometimes stubborn mind around it. It didn't help that another bonsaist, who I greatly respect, said that he had come to appreciate it, even like it.
I think I figured it out, I was looking for the tree, for the image of nature, for the representation of what I have seen in the forests, for a bonsai as my mind had come to expect such to be. Because of the filter I had become accustomed to viewing bonsai though, I was unable to see a bonsai in your carved spirals, your light against dark trunks, your straight living and twisted dead swirling material, your even numbered living and non-living trunks, and your presentation as a whole.
I couldn't see the forest because all the darn trees were in the way. I missed the whole because I was looking to intently at the parts that made it up.
Today, I seen the image and I liked it, excellent work, out of the ordinary but striking, nevertheless.
I now think that this is the best in your gallery, thank you for sharing your work here.
Will
