OUT HERE IN NORTH-CENTRAL GEORGIA, where the rental-car map ends and the Appalachian Trail begins, where the meth epidemic is matched only by the Waffle House epidemic, where every interstate off-ramp leads, eventually, into forested hills or naughty little glens down by rivers—out here, art is going to happen. Trees will draw.

Fifty Leyland cypresses—the artists formerly known as evergreens—stand calmly among 25 acres of their cohorts at the Kinsey Family Farm. While the other trees on this pastoral nursery will be sawed off for Christmas, these special few have been marked for greatness.

The nine-foot cypress trees are shaped like the nibs of fountain pens. Most of the branches swoop up in an arboreal comb-over, but the youngest ones jut straight out, the fresh shoots dividing into wispy sprigs. On one of these sprigs, a black Faber-Castell pencil is attached. The weight of the pencil and the white poly-cotton twine causes it to droop like a limp wrist. In front of the graphite points, just within reach, pads of Strathmore sketch paper rest on plein air easels. As soon as the wind blows, the paper will receive the historic, first-ever drawings made by trees.

At 10 a.m. on an autumn Saturday, the conceptual artist behind this project, 35-year-old Jonathon Keats, is doing what so many conceptual artists do: very little. He wanders among the trees with a ponderous look on his face. And he sweats. Rivulets of moisture appear at the roots of his swept-back, mad-scientist hair, above the collar of his three-piece white linen suit, near his green-and-pink bow tie. As the temperature pushes toward 80 degrees (with 70 percent humidity), his only relief is the ventilation afforded by his pants, which are several inches too short. Oddly, he appears oblivious to the heat.

"Did you know these trees are just three years old?" he asks. " 'My three-year-old could do that' has never been truer!" He lets out a machine-gun laugh that starts at the back of his throat. He is, certainly, a dork's dork. But a charming one. An abridged résumé:

Summa cum laude graduate in philosophy and aesthetics from Amherst College; art critic for San Francisco magazine; columnist for Artweek; recipient of six fine-arts fellowships, even though, as he freely admits, he can't draw or paint; author of worst-selling novels The Pathology of Lies and Lighter Than Vanity. Jonathon lives in a rent-controlled apartment in San Francisco's Chinatown, a space that's cluttered with an oscilloscope and glassware and other trash he's picked up over the years for use in future projects. Of his 11 solo exhibits over the past seven years, the most recent took place at the Modernism gallery, in San Francisco, and included artistic statements like selling futures contracts on his brain ($10 for the option to buy a million neurons at his death) and attempting to genetically engineer God in a petri dish (unsuccessful).

These stunts would be obnoxious if Jonathon weren't sincere, quick to laugh at himself, and truly searching for genuine absurdity. Which is why I flew halfway across the country to observe an art project that I could have set up in my own backyard. I'm convinced that when I look at the trees under Jonathon's tutelage—those uniform rows of Cupressocyparis leylandii—I will gaze into something deeper than his navel.