2021 Holiday Catalogue

In some parts of the mountain West, nearly all the trees are now standing dead timber.  Alongside roadways the Forest Service cuts the dead or dying pines and stacks them into giant slash piles to be burned during the winter months. While in the Medicine Bow National Forest, I frequently encountered house-sized piles of dead lodgepole pines. Each of the slash piles had a discernibly individual character and architecture. Like accidental sculpture, they formed a series of looming, unexpected presences in that mostly wild landscape. 

The similarities and differences among the various piles became the starting point for a series of visual propositions about the translation of observation into representation. Recently I have been questioning the mostly naturalistic way I’ve painted for years, looking for other ways to respond to visual phenomena.I am manifestly interested in observation – all the paintings are responses to actual slash piles – but with forms this complex and intricate, observation can go in many different directions. Some of the organizing principles for this work were the fundamental formal and representational qualities of painting – mark, shape, volume, spatial relationships, color, rhythm, and pattern. Weather, atmosphere, and time of day also entered into consideration. With some I reached back to historical paintings for the palette; others embrace more strident juxtapositions of color. Together, they form a set of investigations as much about how I saw as what I saw.

Kristin Musgnug