The Singular Elegance of Trees
While the image we have in our mind of a tree is one that is balanced and symmetrical, in nature those rarely exist. Trees are individuals. Trees grow to survive, they adapt to their given environment, producing oddly shaped limbs as they become contortionists to get to sunlight, while 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 can challenge and form us as individuals.
After spending many years as a painter of people in NYC I moved upstate to my great grand-parents farm. I began painting fallen branches and limbs I found on the ground while walking my dog. These objects were picked up and brought back to my studio, where I could respond to their interesting shapes and the wonderful natural decoration that adorned them. At first I worked with individual branches, my "muses", creating singular portraits. Soon I found that my ”muses” could be arranged to interact between themselves, forming an anthropomorphic story.
Sometimes paintings are based on real emotions, such as my Family Relations series, and other times they are based on social interactions such as cocktail parties or dancing; as in “Vogueing”. Bill Cunningham’s iconic Seen On The Street photos in the New York Times have also been a wonderful source, my “muses” are certainly dressed to be noticed and are highly accessorized. Other paintings reference specific art history images of groups of people interacting. I have looked at Roman processionals, or pompes, and Dutch paintings of tavern scenes with lascivious older men and younger women with plates of oysters. Bruegel paintings are studied as well as the group The Hairy Who, Gladys Nielsen, especially. Along with these sources I recently have been inspired by a specific Bellini painting in San Zaccaria in Venice, Italy, titled Sacra Conversazione. I have spent time looking at his paintings in churches, where they were meant to be, as compared to museums. The quiet introspective nature of the saints and madonna with child in these paintings is so lovely, they are with each other and connected by belief, but are also individually contemplating their own fate. The paintings make me think about the importance of our connections and communities, that while we are all individuals, we need to be with others too.
So while I use my “muses” as a starting point, I am not creating realistic representations of branches as natural objects, I am asking for them to be my stand-ins for interactions between people. The gestures and movements that the branches form provide a beginning from which I can explore the quirky personalities and interactions that develop. Color and pattern, which I love, can be also be used without rules pertaining to representationalism. In a way that is similar to Charles Burchfield, I use the watercolor medium the way I want to as a painter, not worrying about the conventional rules of painting with that medium. I love to paint, and although I use watercolors, I am not a “watercolorist”, I am a painter. My hope is that the next time you have a chance to visit some woods or walk through a forest you will take a closer look at the unique beauty of trees.
