The Singular Elegance of Trees
When we think of a tree we usually envision an image of a perfectly pruned tree, balanced and symmetrical. In nature those rarely exist. Trees are individuals. Trees grow to survive, they adapt to their given environment, growing into strange shapes, producing oddly shaped limbs, becoming contortionists to get to sunlight, and bowing to the will of other larger trees. They grow in context to each other and their neighbors, adapting as best they can to the situation they find themselves in. In many ways they are similar to us, part of a larger community, whose varied geography and specific environments challenge and form us as individuals.
At first I began painting fallen branches and limbs I found on the ground, responding to their interesting shapes and the wonderful natural decoration that adorned them. I started collecting branches and even large trunks, festooned by lichens, moss and mushrooms and bringing them back to my studio. At first I worked with individual branches, my "muses", creating singular portraits. Soon I found that my branches could be arranged to interact between themselves, forming an anthropomorphic story, sometimes based on real emotions, such as my Family Relations series. While I use the branches as a starting point, I am more interested in the contemporary concerns of painting, than in the realistic representation of branches as natural objects. I love paint and the tension created by the push and pull of surface marks and implied depth, and although I use watercolors I am not a "watercolorist", I am a painter.
The "Cocktail Parties" series presented here came about when a friend noticed how interactive my favorite branches were lined up on the wall together, and suggested painting them as a large group. What immediately came to my mind was a painting I had seen by Gladys Nilsson, one of my favorite painters, a member of the Hairy Who from Chicago. In the painting which is a small watercolor ( at least in my memory) there is a crowded party going on with cocktail glasses, high heels, and very little room to move. I could immediately see my "muses" partying in a painting and set to work. I used the gestures and movements that the branches provided as a beginning from which I could explore color and pattern, as well as pursue the quirky personalities and interactions that developed.
This pandemic has made my studio time more available and our lives more solitary, so I am happy to have had the company of my "muses". Certainly this current period in history has been a very interesting time to think about groups of people, the power and the menace of them, as well as the missed pleasure of being in one.