Memorial Day 2026 aka Beeches No. 6. Bright’s studio. When artist Jay Bright came across a graveyard of fallen beech trees in his beloved East Rock Park in the spring, he couldn’t shake the image. “I was immediately struck with the violence, the breakage and the cutting up of chunks ,” he said in his home studio, around six months later. The beech trees, which are known for their smooth bark, reminded him of torsos. Now Bright has made nearly 30 works of art — and counting — inspired by the fallen beeches. Before that, for 25 years, he had been fixated with the American flag. “The beeches have gotten me off the flag jag,” he said. It’s better for his mental health this way. Bright has lived half a block away from East Rock Park for nearly 50 years. On Wednesday, he invited the Independent to take a look at his beech tree series in his studio, on the sunny upper floor of the Livingston Street home he shares with his wife. Those works of art will be displayed in a January art show at the Ely Center’s CitySeed gallery. The fallen beech trees that Bright saw in East Rock Park were sick with beech leaf disease, a rapidly spreading ailment that has infected the entirety of beech trees in Connecticut and causes the trees to die within two to ten years. The city’s Parks Department cut the trees down as part of a study aimed at promoting forest health in parks that have been impacted by beech leaf disease. (Read more about that study here.) In cutting down some beech trees and treating others, the Parks Department is trying to figure out what our changing urban forests will look like in 50 years. Bright has always loved beech trees. He’s been drawing East Rock Park for a long time, and a watercolor painting of copper beeches in the park hangs in his living room. When he saw the fallen beeches in the spring, he didn’t know they were diseased at first. “It was just riveting to see these major trees drop.” Bright, who is 80 years old, has been an artist since he was in fourth grade. His mother, who was also an artist, sent him to Saturday morning art classes in his neighbor’s basement. He worked for more than 60 years as an architect. Now he spends a few mornings a week making art, sometimes beginning as early as 3 a.m. Beeches 13 AKA Juneteenth Flags 2026. A turning point in his artistic career is when he took a watercolor class at Creative Arts Workshop in the late ’90s. He wanted to learn to paint better watercolor skies. Then he learned how to work with pastel. “Pastels are made to do sky,” he said. “If you want strong color … wham!” Pastel is less unforgiving and time-consuming than watercolor, not as laborious as oil. He wants to be able to move quickly. Pastels give him more control. Now, he makes his beech tree drawings with pastel, but also with charcoal — which is “fussy” and smears easily. Pastel can skid sometimes, when he’s putting a lot of layers down. “Charcoal takes the mark, but it’s a fugitive mark,” he said. “You have to work like crazy to not lose it.” The charcoal’s delicate shading has a striking resemblance to the smooth, ashen bark of a beech tree. But first he starts by sketching. He used to do that on-site, while looking at the trees, but he realized he struggled to get the spatial relationships between them right. So he takes photos, edits them by upping the saturation to make the colors bright, and blows up the photos before printing them on pieces of paper that he tapes together. Reference for the “standing dead” Bright is currently fixated on. When he sketches, he starts bigger. He needs to get the perspective right. Then he can zoom in. He draws the scene over and over and over again — that was his daughter’s recommendation. She’s an artist based in Detroit; her art covers the walls of his home. It’s hard for him to know when a piece is done sometimes. He sends her photos and asks her opinion. They don’t always agree. Still, “It’s wonderful to be able to talk with her at a high level,” he said. Bright appreciates realism but is also drawn to the abstract. Sometimes the trees are vivid, sometimes they’re streaks on paper. He has no problem getting rid of the parts of a scene that he thinks are “in the way” — whether it be a parking lot or leafy vegetation. He enjoys the “poetry” of the flags that line the plots where fallen beech trees are being studied, bright pink and yellow streaks among blues and greens and grays. In his depictions of the trees, there are resemblances to body parts — five branches coming together look almost like a hand, or a trunk looks like a leg. Right now, he’s drawn to the image that he calls the “standing dead,” beech trees that haven’t yet fallen. Many of his works have “the split,” a piece of the excess bark in the center of a tree stump that reveals it wasn’t a clean cut. It indicates resistance, a tear. “It talks about the violence,” Bright said. “It fell before it was cut through.” The beauty of the trees and the violence of their falling are striking. He’s making a lot of art in preparation for his show at the Ely Center in January. He’s thinking bigger, too, because he’ll have a lot of wall space to fill. He tends to work in series, and there aren’t any signs that he’ll stop drawing beech trees soon. He’s also lagging by months, about a season behind: He hasn’t even started drawing scenes of the changing leaves. “There’s plenty to do, and I like being busy,” Bright said. “It got me away from the American flag, which is better for my mental health.” The split. Beeches 12. Rotting stumps. The post Artist Memorializes Fallen Beech Trees appeared first on New Haven Independent. ...read more read less