Nature and Abstraction

Micro and Macro

Walking around looking at nature in the Rocky Mountains gives me much visual information to consider using in my paintings. In the works in my previous post you can see patterns that come directly from natural objects like dried seed pods. The movement of branches in the woods really makes me want to draw those lines and how they interact and intersect in space.
Nature is predictable in the sense that season follows season, plants bloom at certain times.
It's our interaction with nature that brings surprising and unexpected pleasure.

The character Frenhofer in Balzac's said "Nature provides a succession of rounded outlines that run into one another"
I certainly see that every day everywhere I look.
and
 "It is not the language of painters but the language of nature, which we should listen to, the feeling for the things themselves; for reality is more important than the feeling for pictures"

I mostly agree with this quote of Vincent Van Gogh
but I think a lot of the language of painters too.

Subterranean

Subterranean One, Oil on wood, 10" x 10" x 2"

Subterranean Two, Oil on wood, 10" x 10" x 2"

These two paintings are based on a series I did at The Vermont Studio Center in  2010.
(see four images below)

I was trying to interpret in oil paint on wood what I did with watercolor, gouache and ink on paper. 
The original four pieces were done from drawings of aspen tree trunks.
When I turned the paper 90 degrees to the left and all of a sudden the drawings lost their tree-ness.
The edge of the trunk became a horizon line and the shapes and forms were underneath the earth!
I imagine these as things growing underground, thus the name Subterranean for the series.
I recently read an article about the abstract painter Mark Grotjahn, whose wonderful Butterfly paintings I saw at the new Blum and Poe Gallery in NYC.  About those paintings, he said "I found that rotating it (the canvas 90 degrees) took all the landscape out, so it became a non-objective painting.

From Real to Abstract

Is there a relationship between these two paintings?

An on-site watercolor and a studio work on paper?

When I work back and forth between "reality" and abstraction I like to think

that the shapes and abstract linear elements come directly from my observation of nature

during the act of seeing and painting what I see.  They also come from everyday

visual phenomenon such as when certain light conditions force shapes to pop in and outof

 the landscape in a totally unrealistic way, but that makes the scene more surprising and dynamic.

Here is a paragraph from an article by the painter Carroll Dunham in Artforum magazine on the 

occasion of the Alexander Calder exhibition a the Whitney Museum of American Art in 2009.

"There can seem to be a generic modernity to Calder's work, almost a New Yorker cartoon

version of biomorphic abstract art (a quality Jean Arp certainly shares), but this is the flip

side of something cloaked deeply essential in modernism: the somewhat cloaked use of nature as a conceptual and philosophical platform. The organically inspired forms that become increasingly central to Calder's work place him in a stream that runs through modernist thought, past worldwide war and the dawn of the atomic age on it's way to more recent (or less obviously cataclysmic) times, when it may appear to have run dry. But it stems from an archaic impulse, and it will be interesting to see if events in the world soon outpace our abiltiy  or need) to effect its denial."

Ciprés

 

Ciprés 

watercolor, gouache on 300# Arches, 20" x 50"

  Ciprés y Nubes

Ciprés y Tristeza

The cypress tree, in classical times, symbolized mourning. It was associated with death and the underworld because it failed to regenerate when cut back too severely. Today it remains the principal tree in cemeteries in both the Muslim world and Europe.

Ovid recorded the myth of Cyparissus. In the story he kills his beloved stag. His grief and remorse were so inconsolable that he asked to weep forever. He was transformed into "cipressus sempervirens", the Meditteranean cypress tree. The tree's sap represents his tears.

The winter of 2013/2014 in Northern Spain was where I painted the small on-site paintings

of cypresses, in the Parque del Ebro and also in the cemetery in Logroño.

These larger works were just completed in my studio in Ridgway.

On Drawing

To draw is to look, examining the structure of appearances.

A drawing of a tree shows, not a tree, but a tree-being-looked-at.

Whereas the sight of a tree is registered almost instantaneously,

the examination of the sight of a tree (a tree-being-looked-at) 

not only takes minutes or hours instead of a fraction of a second, 

it also involves, derives from, and refers back to, 

much previous experience of looking,

Within the instant of the sight of a tree is established a life-experience. 

This is how the act of drawing refuses the process of disappearances

 and proposes the simultaneity of a multitude of moments.

Berger On Drawing - John Berger

COUNTING TREES, drawings and a poem

Four Trees - upon a solitary Acre

(poem 742)

by Emily Dickinson

Four Trees - upon a solitary Acre

Without Design

Or Order, or Apparent Action - 

Maintain -

The Sun - upon a Morning meets them - 

The Wind -

No nearer Neighbor - have they - 

but God -

The Acre gives them - Place - 

They - Him - Attention of Passer by - 

Of Shadow, or of Squirrel, haply - 

Or Boy - 

What Deed is Theirs unto the General Nature - 

What Plan

They severally - retard - or further - 

Unknown - 

 

TWO MONTHS LATER after a busy summer!

LOOKING AFTER TREES

Tomorrow is the last day of this exhibition at The Art Center in Grand Junction, CO.

You can view the online catalogue at

 http://www.issuu.com/lookingaftertrees/docs/looking_after_trees/1

 VIEW OF THE SAN JUANS from MILLER MESA

"When you go out to paint try to forget what objects you have before you, a tree, a house, a field or whatever.

Merely think, here is a little streak of blue, here and oblong of pink, here a streak of yellow, and paint it just as it looks to you. The exact color and shape, until it gives you your own naive impression of the scene before you."

Claude Monet 

 LONE CONE - Hand Colored Woodblock Print
www.twelveviewsoflonecone.blogspot.com

A VERY busy summer! Thank you to all our friends who welcomed us back to the USA.
We have decided not to return to Spain for work, but will continue to visit and learn more about that fascinating country!
I will stay here in Colorado and continue to paint this landscape and these trees. Also teaching and exhibiting my work. TWELVE VIEWS OF LONE CONE,  the woodblock prints will be exhibited in October at Stronghouse Studios, Telluride Arts.
Please check the above website for the latest information.