Thoughts on Dan Robinson - Part 2

After being greeted by the bear there in the dark early hours of the morning, I crawled off to bed. A few minutes later, or so it seemed, there was daylight streaming through the window. Then there was a bang on the door and it flew open and there was Dan, dressed and ready for the new day. In a booming voice he called out "You going to sleep all day?"

Apparently not!

Soon I was up and around and had a chance to see where I was, to lay eyes on all that was hidden in the dark when I first arrived. It seems I had been sleeping in a museum. Dan and Diane's home is unlike any other I have ever seen. It is a storehouse of curious and exotic items — antiques from the other side of the world, beautiful artwork, stuffed animals and trophy mounts (purchased at auctions and estate sales, none of them killed by Dan or Diane), live animals, large tropical plants and big boulders. There were big boulders, in the house. The house must have been built around them because the rocks are too big to have been brought in the door. Dan built the house, not all by himself, but he had an active hand in the design and construction. No wonder it is an original, one-of-a-kind place. Step outside the house and you see that it is built alongside a beautiful lake, surrounded by tall Western redcedars. Or maybe you do not notice that right away because your attention is grabbed by all the bonsai, scores of them, maybe hundreds, and all unique in their character. Many of them have the appearance of collected trees, but others are younger looking and there are even some tropicals, which surprises you. These specimens are scattered all about the place here and there, which causes you to notice the landscaping — the boulders, the trees growing in the ground but shaped and sculpted like bonsai. You realize then you are looking at another Dan Robinson landscape, like Elandan, and like the others he has built for people who hire him to create these little pieces of wonderland around their homes. Seeing this, and the house too, you become aware that Dan is a creative force. He works with nature and reshapes it to express his idealized vision of the natural world.

We had a good look around his homestead, then Dan and I got in his truck and he proceeded to conduct a tour of several big, old growth trees in the area a few miles around where he lives. These are trees that were once part of the great Pacific Northwest forest, which has been largely cleared for profit and converted to tree farms or to make way for human habitation, or otherwise tamed for purposes of human enterprise. These few trees Dan was showing me somehow survived the great reshaping of the land.  He has known these trees for many years because he has lived in that region for a long time, and he has sought them out and has come to regard them as old friends. At every place we stopped to observe these ancient giants, Dan expounded on the features each tree displayed and the forces of nature that shaped all of them. When you hear him talk, it is obvious Dan has spent a lifetime out in the field, observing and thinking. He knows many facts and has many theories about how trees grow. Sometimes it is difficult to know where fact leaves off and theory begins, but every bit of the information is backed up by first-hand experience in the field, out among the trees. He talked about how this knowledge of ancient trees informs the way he designs his bonsai, and this is of particular interest to me. I am doing this now, taking my own experience of trees as I know them and integrating it into my bonsai work. It is more difficult to do than you might think. To begin with, you must put in the time out among trees in nature, observing them critically, actively working to understand them, to appreciate the way they grow differently one to the next, what shapes them and why. I allow myself to think I know more about this stuff than most people in bonsai, but Dan knows more about it than I do, at least as regards the great old trees in his neck of the woods. He is a lover of trees and I identify with him that way.

By and by we made our way to Elandan and Dan left me there to fend for myself while he headed off on a pruning job. The tree to be shaped that day was a full-sized canopy tree in someone's yard and Dan would be directing the work from the ground, as he no longer does the aerial chainsaw work himself. Dan used to climb the big ones but he recently decided to give it up, a grudging nod to the fact that he is now 75 years old. At Elandan I spent a little time catching up with Diane Robinson, who was taking care of business behind the counter at the gift shop and gallery she runs there. Her store is filled with wondrous bits of this and that from all over the world, the same kind of things I saw displayed all over the Robinson house earlier that day. A person might spend hours exploring it all, but I did not. My interest was strongly focused on the bonsai and those were outside in the open air museum, so I soon made my way out there. The garden was as I remembered it, but after fourteen years the landscape is naturally more mature, filled in, settled and comfortable. When I was there in 2001 it was all still fairly new and a little raw. This is the natural progression with gardens — it takes them a while to come into their own. I began to wander around, and wherever I cast my eyes there was something of interest to see. Dan's garden features fantastic displays of rock work with delicate alpine plants growing in crevices, and sculpted rock (done by Dan's son, Will), and sculpted landscape trees, and those statuesque old snag tree corpses jutting up toward the sky, and beautiful bits of borrowed Pacific Northwest scenery everywhere you look, like the waters of Puget Sound or a bald eagle flying overhead. And throughout this magical landscape, informally distributed on a stand here or a rock there, are the bonsai.

A person might say that Dan Robinson’s bonsai are an acquired taste. What does that mean? It means if you have firmly fixed in your head a certain idea about how bonsai are supposed to look, when you see Dan's bonsai you are going to think they look all wrong, just as I thought they looked wrong when I first saw them years ago. If your idea about bonsai has been shaped by the look of Japanese bonsai, if you think the Japanese example represents the ultimate level of bonsai excellence, the model to which all who pursue bonsai should aspire, then Dan's trees will probably look like poor work, more like pre-bonsai than bonsai. You will admire their great age but you will think they need fixing up by someone who better understands what bonsai should look like. On the other hand, if the formality of bonsai as it is generally practiced feels a bit stuffy to you, or if your bonsai thinking has expanded beyond the parameters of what you were taught and you have reached a point of understanding where the Japanese example becomes but one possibility on a whole menu of bonsai styles, then Dan's work might speak to you. And if you are, as I am, a person drawn to the natural beauty of those things we call trees, and if you have ever lamented, as I have, that there is such a gulf between the look of trees as they exist in nature and trees as they are represented in conventional bonsai, then Dan's work will definitely speak to you. Dan Robinson's bonsai look like trees from the wild. His bonsai represent ancient trees with fabulous trunks, gnarly branches and lots of deadwood. They are trees full of character, just the way he likes them.

I am always on the lookout for bonsai that have something to say about the experience of trees in nature. I find them now and again, too, but not so often. All the bonsai at Elandan Gardens have that character. To be sure, if you were out walking and came across a landscape-sized version of one of Dan's bonsai it would be the most amazing tree you ever saw. Still, the form of the thing would be credible. His bonsai are fantastic but believable. Under the right circumstances, a tree in nature actually could grow the way Dan shapes his bonsai, and this matters to me for some reason. As I wandered around the garden that day every tree on display was a lesson and I was looking closely, making mental notes. Whereas years ago I walked those same paths and marveled at what I saw as so many pieces of great old plant material, mentally reworking them into the more refined and artificial shapes I had memorized from bonsai books and magazines, now I looked at Dan's trees as the work of an artist. I studied them to see what I could learn, trying to understand why he does things the way he does them. I used the term "artist" just now and that begs for clarification. That word is often used casually as a catch-all for any person who does creative work, whether it is painting or music or bonsai or whatever. There is a higher plane of meaning for the word artist, though, and when it is applied in that sense it must be used with far greater discretion. There are relatively few artists. Many people want to be, and some declare themselves to be, but there are few real artists in bonsai. 

Who gets to decide who is an artist and who is not? 

I do.

I get to decide for myself, anyway. You can decide for yourself who is and who is not a bonsai artist, and if you want to approach it with a more-the-merrier mentality, go right ahead. I am very selective in applying that term in its higher sense of meaning and I call Dan Robinson an artist. The reason his bonsai looked so much better to me this time around probably does not have much to do with the effect of the last fourteen years on his trees. The trees probably have not changed all that much. The change is in me. It has taken the last fourteen years for me to finally catch on to what Dan's art is all about.

That is not to say I agree with everything he does in bonsai, nor do I think Dan himself is some sort of superior human being. There is already too much of the cult of personality at work in the world of bonsai. Factions are formed in defensive allegiance to this teacher and to that master, or even to this one who studied with that one, and I will not contribute to it. Rather, I see Dan as a kindred spirit when it comes to understanding how bonsai can be used as an artistic vehicle for expressing an individual experience of nature. He came to that realization and created a body of work exemplifying that philosophy long before I started my bonsai career. I identify that approach as naturalism, although Dan apparently does not think of it that way. He thinks of his way of doing bonsai as "his" way — the only way that makes sense to him. 

Call it what you will, I think highly of Dan's work. He is a pioneer of naturalistic bonsai and I follow in his wake. He is generous with his information too, and can articulate his ideas and show you what he means with fabulous bonsai that are the product of his own mind and his own hands. There are a number of Dan's ideas I do not agree with and would not choose to follow, and there are things I want to do in bonsai that hold no apparent interest whatsoever to him, but this is of little matter. There are aspects of his personality I suspect would wear badly on me if I were overexposed to them. I take it as a given that Dan might say the same about me, but this is of little matter, either. All that matters in the end is the work he does and what that work represents and what it means in the larger context of bonsai history. Dan Robinson is important because of his work. His work is important because it can be used as proof of bonsai’s legitimacy as an art form.

To be continued…