Savage Tree Series — Four New Starts
These are performance pieces for an upcoming exhibition. I revisit this series every year. The galleries respond to it. So do I.
A word about what these paintings actually are — because they're not paintings of trees.
Morandi spent a career painting bottles and blocks of color. He wasn't interested in bottles. He was interested in the intervals between them — the space, the silence, the push and pull of proximity.
Same idea here. The trees are not the subject. They're the instrument.
What I'm after is the oscillation — the moment a viewer's eye slips between the trunks and finds the shoreline beyond, then gets pulled back to the surface again. Forward and back. Near and far. The trees become a kind of visual screen, and the question I'm asking with each painting is: how wide, and how far apart?
Size, value, edge quality, color — everything is calibrated to that one perceptual problem. Not to describe trees, but to make the viewer move inside the painting.
But there's a second reason I return to this series. It's a personal barometer.
Can I still perform — and stay lost at the same time?
That's the tension I'm watching for. These paintings have a way of tightening up on me. Of becoming more concerned with explanation than feeling. More controlled than searching. When that happens, I can see it immediately. The oscillation stops. The painting answers its own question too quickly, and something dies in it.
The goal is to stay uncertain long enough for something true to happen.
54 x 45 Savage Trees (my traditional start) underwear first then position the veritcals
31.5 x 32.5 Savage Trees Study I
54 x 45 Savage Trees (more lyrical beginning—I want to leave room for the reflections to extend the vertical dark shape)
36 x 36 Savage Trees Study II
