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 
Funny that the first thing I thought of when I saw this painting is bittersweet – not the complexity of emotion, but the plant that filled Iowa ditches when I was growing up.
It’s so hard to find now, and nearly impossible in Texas, so I content myself with a few sprigs of really quite nicely-done artificial bittersweet and some of my grandmother’s dishes that have the plant as a decorative decal.
This time of year, it’s difficult to see orange and not think first of jack-o-lanterns, but I didn’t. Very well done.
I think what’s going on in the orange ground area is really interesting. The dark swirls and broken darker areas suggest a sense of foreground, middle ground and background by becoming less defined and lighter as the ground approaches your horizen.
Also these dark designs seem to define the form of the “mound”. Nice stuff.
Without Tex, I think we are in trouble.
Your trees remind me of a set of three trees on the road between Anstruther and St. Andrews in Scotland. My in-laws lived in Anstruther for many years, and I’m always surprised by how close you come to capturing those trees that we drove past so many times when we visited there. This one is nearly perfect – the lay of the land down toward the Anstruther harbor, and the upswell where the trees are, and the shape of the trees. I was never there in Autumn, but I’m pretty sure this is what it would look like then. They sold the house when my father-in-law passed away, just over 2 years ago, and we haven’t been back. This painting captures that little bit of bittersweet perfectly. I love it.