Tree Branch Shadows
Floating on Snow Abstractly
$150
A Viewer's Curious Questions
Virginia Coury's amusing and insightful December 24, 2025 Facebook comments on my art posting of Tree Branch Shadows Floating on Snow Abstractly deserve a thoughtful response...
Re: I really love the simplicity of your paintings. It tickles my funny bone that when I think you couldn't possibly make a subject simpler and more pared down, you dare to take that range down a notch further.
Indeed, I often do series of studies, the first one the most detailed, and keep simplifying. Perhaps most people would look at the series and think the order I painted was simplified to detailed, but it's actually detailed to simplified. Though, for this one, Tree Branch Shadows Floating on Snow Abstractly, it was a one and done.
I note from my online museum searches that the great artists painting throughout the lives tend to simplify their art during their painting journey. I quite like and enjoy this Paul Cezanne, Study of Trees, painted two years before he completed his journey through life, pure simplicity with the road and trees. I saw it in person at Harvard's art museum, oil on canvas, 19" x 25" (w x h), circa 1904:
Study of Trees
Paul Cezanne (1839-1906), French
Oil on canvas, 19" x 25" (w x h), circa 1904
Museum Notes edited:
Museum Notes edited:
Study of Trees, painted two years before he died, exemplifies Cezanne depicting depth on a flat canvas. This had been a focus of his for most of his career. Energetic diagonal brush strokes slice the space of the picture, producing the suggestion of movement in and out of depth, and dashed lines define the tree trunks on either side of a country winding road. The rough, unpainted areas of the canvas seem as animated as the daubs of paint flickering across the picture's surface, like leaves in shifting sunlight. At the time of its making, Study of Trees was at the vanguard of intellectualized, abstract painting.
I also posted a visual essay on Paul Cezanne's simplicity with watercolors that he painted later in life, Paul Cézanne Watercolors with a Light Touch on my website HERE.
Re: People say that we shouldn't scratch further than art itself and just appreciate it for its own sake. However, my first real exposure to art was through reading...
I study art online using most of the major museum's collections which are online. I look at the art and I read about the art. When I paint and note the colors or ideas in the art, I look online at how other artist have approached this. I often post essays of the other's art, like paintings also using orange and blue, or simply paintings also using red roofs on houses.
Re: Do you pare down everything in your surroundings and in life to their most intrinsic elements? I am somehow picturing a monastic existence - free of clutter. My husband would ask me "Why does that matter to you?" I suppose it's for the same reason I had to look up the origin of the word "codger" (an often mildly eccentric and usually elderly fellow).
Amusing comment, does my life reflect the simplicity of my art? My life is certainly organized, though my home full of watercolors lined up everywhere, scattered yet I can usually find anything anywhere. When my desk gets too messy and full of paintings and notes and frames piled up and surrounding my computer, I pare it down to it's simplest form. Thinking about that, perhaps it's the same method I simplify my art, from the complex to the simplest, a form where the mind can think and see clearly.
2 comments:
Thank you for this! Have you ever heard a comedian who goes into a riff and you keep wondering if this guy is "going to go even further? --and to your disbelief, he DOES? Bill Burr and Louis CK come to mind. That kind of hubris is always thrilling as it presses the edges of what is comfortable and then expands our awareness. Plus it makes us laugh... mostly at ourselves and our strange comfort in our belief that we are the center of everything.
Your paintings actually make me smile because they do the same thing. "Can he make it even simpler?" and then, if course, you do. George Saunders gives writer advice in his on-line tutorials -- here it is (too long but shortened). "Write something in 300 words, now take out 150 words. Next, remove 75 words. Next take out another 25 words. Everytime I have done this, the work is stronger, more vibrant. I think your paintings are following a George Saunders approach to art. Thank you for putting a little zest where I can see it!
*do you see what I did there? "zest" -- a little punster humor
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