Say Goodbye

Say goodbye to this wonderful old tree, that's been a part of Opus 40 forever. We've kept it going on life support and nutrients for the last decade or so, but there's no life left in it now.

Tomorrow it comes down, and a new tree will be planted in its place, thanks to the generosity of the Richards/Jessup family of Santa Fe, as a gift in honor of their daughter Alexandra's wedding, that will take place this June.

Trees go...it's a fact of nature. An environmental sculpture, unless it's a temporary piece like the ones Christo and Jeanne-Claude make, is always a work in progress, and always a collaborative work. Your collaborator is Nature, and you collaborator doesn't always like you very much, and she rarely has the same ideas you do.

And if you don't keep up your end, Nature may just decide to scrap the project altogether, as was the fate of many of the earthworks of the 1970s. We're dedicated to making sure that doesn't happen to Opus 40. We have said that Opus 40 could stand for a thousand years, and it could, but not quite in its present form -- all kept up for viewing, and for walking on. That takes a lot of work, and a lot of money. We're good on the first, always struggling on the second.