This is a new painting, just finished yesterday. It’s an 18″ by 18″ canvas that is a very simple tonal composition, letting the atmosphere created between the sky and the burnt orange field that runs to the horizon create the impact of the painting. It has a very clear air about it that gives it the sense of being a very distinct moment in time.
It has a bittersweet feel, at least in the way I see it. The openness of the landscape and the stream that runs to a far horizon indicates a hopeful, forward looking quality. Optimistic. But the colors in the sky and the field have tinges of darkness that hint at an underlying deeper and less optimistic quality. Perhaps the shaded thinking that comes with experience.
The tree itself, for me, has the hallmarks of these same traits. It is bright and upward moving yet it is bent and twisted from factors that have influenced its growth over its life on that little mound next to a small stream. The hardships of its past are written in its appearance. Yet it remains upward moving, pulled toward light.
From the last brushstroke that touched the canvas, this is how I saw this piece– as a product of its past, determined by how it weathered its experience.
It is bent. It is twisted. Yet it stands tall and hopeful, open to a new day.
Well, that’s how I see it. Maybe its just a twisty tree on an orange mound.
Redtree Times 