Speaking of trees: Color and Season

The Park. Gustav Klimt

Speaking of trees, something about the end of the season has me nostalgic for the lush green leaves of summer. Here are my favorite summer trees…all green with no hint of the coming autumn. Pisarro’s colors especially just glow with a warm energy.

Ferry on a River. Salomon van Ruysdael
 
Chestnut Trees at Osny. Camille Pisarro

Fontainebleau: Oak Tree at Bas Brea. Camille Corot
Promenade Among the Olive Trees. Henri Matisse

Matisse’s colors are like a swan song. Then Monet’s pale colors and then Mondrain’s stark palette speak of the coming winter.

Four Trees. Claude Monet
Grey Tree. Piet Mondrain
But no point in thinking about that now. The leaves haven’t started dropping yet, and tonight should be a great kick off to the New York Fall art season, with lots of great gallery openings, including a group showat Friedrich Petzel Gallery and Nathan Carter at Casey Kaplan.

Maggie Tobin’s Luminous Treetops

 Green

I found Maggie Tobin through Art In Brookyn–always nice to have hyperlocal resources–and the artist maes some lovely images of tree branches, displaced and translucent. It reminds me of lying on your back in the grass and looking up to see the such shine through branches, all black in thick relief.

Tobin notes how she captures such a deep yet luminous effect in her artist’s statement:

The trees are painted in oil on translucent vellum stretched over mirror creating a subtle luminous quality and 3-dimensional effect. I try to capture the sublime quality of the Hudson River Luminists as well as the sense of limitless space in twelfth century Chinese Southern Sung landscapes. Within my paintings there are no cultural references; I aim to reflect the timelessness of nature in a fleeting moment.

Fontenelle

The subject matter and the medium really work well together here. AND The artist’s website features flipbooks (fun!) and other goodies.