Redtree Times

Egon Schiele- Vier Baume ( Four Trees)

I must see new things and investigate them. I want to taste dark water and see crackling trees and wild winds.

–Egon Schiele

There was a John Mellencamp album from 1990, Big Daddy, that had a song with the line:” Henry sent a postcard from a better place…”  There’s something in that line that has stuck in my memory far more than the original song. In my head, the line transformed into a simple send me postcards from better place and always comes to mind when I receive a postcard from friends or family. I thought of it yesterday when I received this postcard from a friend that I know through my paintings who now lives in Slovakia.

It’s an image of the painting Vier Baume (shown above) from the great Austrian painter Egon Schiele whose work has always captivated me. He saw it while visiting the Belvedere Museum in Vienna and it reminded him of my paintings, joking that this Schiele guy must have been influenced by GC Myers. His mother, a lovely woman who I know and who was visiting with him there, added the line, “If only he’d thought to put a red chair in the tree!”  Gave me a chuckle.

One of the great perks of doing my job is having my work connect with people and have them tell me of how they are reminded of this at different times in their travels. I posted a photo here last year that was given to me at a gallery talk by a man who was on a boat off the coast of Venezuela when he spotted a tiny island with a single twisted tree atop it.  It reminded him of one of my paintings and he was kind enough to snap a photo of it for me. 

These little gestures mean an awful lot to me as small validations of the strength and voice of the work. When I’m painting in the solitude of my studio, I can only hope that the piece I’m at work on will have such an impact to make someone far removed think of it beyond the moment when they actually see it.  There’s something oddly comforting to me in this thought. 

Perhaps the postcards sent are because these folks view my painting as a sort of postcard from a better place?

Who knows?

I thought I’d revive this post from back in 2011 to share a couple of other “postcards from better places” that grace my studio courtesy of some friends who saw something out there in the world that reminded them of my work. They are my little treasures. I can’t tell you how often my eyes fall on these pieces, making me smile. The Red Tree on the left is courtesy of Stacy Spier and Jeff Snyder while the piece on the right with the bare tree with the furrowed rows in the foreground is from Stevan Knapp.

Don’t know that these images do them justice. Believe me when I say that they have great impact for me.

Below them is the song, Theo and Weird Henry, from John Mellencamp referred to in the original post.