"Say goodbye!" ordered Mr. Brignone, 80, waving a carved tree branch and wearing a long caftan.
Some Native Americans also carved tree trunks into family trees (calling them, of course, totem poles) and today the largest extant family tree, that of Confucius, goes back 2,500 years.
Meanwhile, Oprah claimed her on-set throne in the shape of a carved tree trunk.
In his work that concept has taken the form of pieces like "Repeat the Woodland" and various others entitled "Trees," in which he carves trees from planks of wood, patiently restoring the form from which the planks were derived.
Turns out – and I tell you this at the expense of my right hip – powder skis aren't particularly suited to quick carving through trees on an icy trail.
Around this "contested site", he found swastikas carved into tree trunks – "One of the darkest places I've ever been".
You carve the tree first with the chain saw, and that takes a little while to do.
His cut-out texts and scrawled intimacies resemble less the tired mannerisms of urban tagging than the erotic reveries once etched into toilet walls or the heartfelt romanticisms carved into tree bark.
One day, he said, the groundskeeper told him and his buddies that if they would stop carving up the tree, he would give it to them.
They've been doing equally bromantic selfies in front of a Christmas tree, carving a turkey on Thanksgiving, hanging out by the Wall Steet bull (with McKellen wearing a particularly swagged-out jacket), getting boozed, and bumping into the God of funk and Twitter, Questlove.
Photographs of words carved on trees rhyme visually with etched Formica benches.
