This painting comes from my core in a lot of ways. It shows one of the places in the forest that I love, thick pines above, damping the sun. The ground is covered with pine needles that muffle all sounds. Silence. At the end of the day, after a brief rain, the light pushes across the damp lichen encrusted tree trunks. Rough pine bark chunky and flaking.
I had not been to this campground in a long time and was moved by the raw quality of the uncut forest.
It is a few miles from where French-Canadian explorers Jean Nicolet and Pere Jacques Marquette first set foot in this part of the north country in 1673, having canoed across the Great Lakes from Quebec. The mythology of their exploring these wild places resonated with me.
Jean Nicolet coming to shore in Wisconsin, 1673
The orange in my painting is a series of thinned layers built up to give a transparent fleeting quality. The trees are deep and dark, paint thickened and heavy. My intent is to lift the sense of place towards the magic that I have always found in Paul Gauguin’s paintings of the South Pacific. Gauguin uses color and abstraction to evoke the essential story of a place. I am friendly with his “Day of the God” (1894) a painting hung with pride of place at the Art Institute of Chicago. Native women lay on pink sand with the colors of the spirits presented swirling in the water at the edge of the sand. A different place and the same.
Mahana no auta (Day of the God) Paul Gauguin, 1894