Sky Tree by Thomas Locker (1995) is a gem for children who love art and the environment. Sky tree is a lone oak tree at the top of a hill. Locker paints the tree in 14 different contexts. Its leaves are a deep green in summer, radiant orange in fall, and scattered on the ground as winter nears. Locker fills the naked branches with migrating birds, white puffy clouds, snowfall, and evening stars. Each oil painting is accompanied by one or two sentences of description and a question. “Why is this painting so strange and startling?” is the question that accompanies the tree on a gray day. Each question has an answer at the back of the book. I hope readers are free to express their own perceptions.
Curious that coauthor Candace Christiansen’s name doesn’t appear on the cover. Christiansen is a science teacher who sprinkled a little science into this book.
