Artist Statement
The Singular Elegance of Trees, and Merry Company
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.
After spending many years as a painter of people in NYC I moved upstate to my grandparents farm. Lacking easy access to humans as subject matter 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. 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, and other times based on social interactions such as cocktail parties and dancing. Many of my paintings reference art history images of groups of people interacting. Roman processionals, Dutch Tavern scenes, Bruegel paintings, and the Hairy Who. 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. I use the gestures and movements that the branches provide as a beginning from which I can explore color and pattern, as well as pursue the quirky personalities and interactions that develop.
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.
