Category Archives: painting

Speaking of trees: Color and Season

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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

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 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.  

Refreshment on a Summer Afternoon

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Basket of Wild Strawberries

One would be lucky to find oneself with Chardin’s bowl of strawberries one hot summer day washed down simple water. Nothing pretentious here–just a glorious warm red, and earthy immediacy, and a beautifully painted piece of carefully rendered depths. It looks as if you could reach in and pick one.

The quality of Chardin’s naturalistic painting in the 17th-century Dutch tradition was exceptional and his success as a painter of animals, birds, and fruit was immediate. The critic Diderot wrote in 1767, “One pauses instinctively in front of a Chardin like a weary traveler who sits down . . . in a grassy spot that offers silence, water, shade, and a cooling breeze.” I agree. 

May your long last weekend of summer be full of wild strawberries.