New Inspirations
What's In a Tree?
I have completed well over 50 of the Doodles in the Dark and while I’m not finished with them, I am at the same time also trying to go in a different direction. One quickly finds that it is not so easy to stray from a chosen path, but it’s fun to experiment. So in this section are experiments. Some finished, some woefully unfinished. Some seem promising; some are disasters in the making.
I have always been intrigued by the idea of what can be on a tree and inside a tree. A few years ago, I made a painting of a tree without limbs but with hands and feet protruding, and animals on it. That painting was bought and hung in a house in Rappahannock County that friends of mine had just bought, and then that house burnt down. I felt so sorry for my friends, that I promised them to paint a copy, which I then found impossible to do. But I did it anyway, and here is the result. Side by side by the original.
A Dead Tree in Madrid
A few years back I was in Madrid, and discovered the Museo Lázaro Galdiano. It is located all the way in the north of the city and has a fabulously eclectic collection, which includes a Hieronymus Bosch, whose St John the Baptist bears an uncanny resemblance to my cousin Louis. In the bookshop I found a little book about a tree that had fallen in the museum’s garden, entitled Árbol Caído, Fallen Tree. There were also the letters MAB on the cover, which referred to Miguel Ángel Blanco. This artist concentrates on trees and the book was full of his artwork inspired by fallen trees. I bought it, then lost it somewhere in my studio. Until I found it and let myself be inspired by it. The pieces I have made so far, you can find in the second section under Current Work,"Fallen/Dying Trees". Here are two examples.
Trees in France
I divide my time between Washington, DC, Virginia, and France. There we spend a couple of months every year, in our ancient little house in medieval Castelnau de Montmiral in the Tarn in Occitania, in the middle of the South of France. The town is surrounded by linden trees and looks out on fields, vineyards and forests. In my studio there I covered a nasty crack in the whitewashed wall with a painting of one of my signature trees.
This year, 2024, I will show some of my work in a local gallery there at the end of the summer.
