Ritratto
del pittore come on albero antico
Portrait of the Artist as an Old Tree
32" x
60"
1999
The Road Not Taken
Autumn Glory
This is not a painting of any real place; it is completely manufactured.
I love painting trees and I don't always have to see the tree in
order to paint it. This is pointillism, where the paint is applied
in small areas, all over the place, and it is a more developed
pointillism than the first painting we looked at. I have even taken
it further than this in some of my later work. It is, I think,
an influence from my weaving, in that I apply the color in almost
the same way as I weave different threads together.
Cornish
View
Plein
aire
Bhudda by the Connecticut
Lagoon Near the Old Toll Bridge on the Connecticut
River
Two Pines
View from my Westminster Studio
This is a view from my Massachusetts studio. I faced Meetinghouse
Pond and, just behind, you can barely make out Mount Wachusett.
This was done at the time of year when the goldenrod was blooming
and the asters and the yucca plant had completed their bloom. We
lived there for seven or eight years and it was blessedly quiet.
Now Mount Wachusett is covered with lights and ski lanes and traffic
galore, and I am glad I don't live there anymore.
Yggdrasil the World Tree
In
Norse mythology, Yggdrasil ('The Terrible One's Horse'), is
a giant tree that links and shelters all the worlds.
This
painting was done in 1970 and was influenced by the works of
Carl Jung.
I had read his autobiography and then I had read a number
of his collected works in which he paid great attention to
dreams
and myths. In this case, I went back to my Scandinavian roots
and it is a tree called Ygddrasil. It is a World Tree and
at the top lived the Gods, in the middle lived the humans,
and
at the bottom lived the little people who tend to the welfare
of cows and that sort of thing. Under them, in the roots,
are the bad people, called the Frost Giants and they very often
are frozen.
There
is no attempt here at realism - this is surrealism,
in which two or three things are happening at the same
time. It is an attempt to get the feeling of movement. It is
also
very tapestry-like. It was a year before I started weaving
tapestry when this was painted, and there was a great influence
back-and-forth, after this, between my tapestry weaving
and my painting. It is a very muted palette and it is done
entirely
with large brushes.
