This weekend with the help of four other people, three dogs and a cat, I took the large burned tree paintings, After the First Death and Burned at the Base out to the snowy woods. Ruth and I had spent part of the previous day tromping around the vicinity, scouting for the right group of trees. It took about 4 hours to stage the paintings, to put protective fabric and plastic up to keep small branches from poking and sap from sticking to the backs of the paintings, to pin them in place, to photograph them and take them down. The temperatures with in the 20’s (Fahrenheit), with light snow. Good thing Steve is over 6 feet (2 meters) tall; we needed his height so that the base of the tree showed at the bottom.
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- Warming up my hands (Ruth Nielsen photo)
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- De-installing (Ruth Nielsen photo)
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- Tonka guards the painting (Ruth Nielsen photo)
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- Suze photographing the scene (Ruth Nielsen photo)
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- Installation (Ruth Nielsen photo)
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- Staging (Ruth Nielsen photo)
I’m thrilled with how compelling they look in their (un?) natural habitat. There is something visually intriguing about the mix of rendered and photographed surfaces; how well they blend in and yet how much they stand out. This is as exciting as when I started burning drawings of burned forests on rice paper.
I learned a great deal in the process, were I to repeat this installation. It’s astonishing how much engineering and problem-solving there is in fine art!
[…] experience, earlier this year, of wrapping large paintings around live trees was so personally and artistically exciting that I applied to the Center on Contemporary Art’s […]