Paper Trees

Ernest Haskell worked across multiple media: watercolors, lithographs, drawings, engravings, and, his best-known medium, etchings. The Oak and the Abode shows a gigantic oak tree embowering a rural home, suggesting the dual role of nature as comforter and protector. Haskell’s reputation as a leader of American etching is clear in this work with its exceptionally detailed depiction of shadow, light, texture, and perspective.

Ernest Haskell (American, born Woodstock, Connecticut, 1876–1925), The Oak and the Adobe, 1919, etching on paper, High Museum of Art, Atlanta, 58.89.

For over forty-five years, David C. Driskell meditated on the majesty and spiritualism of the pine tree. He first explored the subject during an artist’s residency at Maine’s Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in 1953, inspired by the pine trees in the region. He revisited the subject often, employing bold swaths of color and heavy brushwork to suggest the pine’s evergreen resilience and using a fractured visual language to convey a sense of dynamic movement. For Driskell, the pine tree’s distinctive needles, branches, and trunk made it a unique challenge for translating a three-dimensional object onto a two-dimensional plane:

I looked at trees with the notion of trying to see segments of them. I was trying to see into the center of the tree, around it, and up into its branches. I wanted to go beyond the known qualities of the tree and investigate its atmosphere. I wanted to take the viewer in all directions within the tree at one time.

David C. Driskell (American, born Eatonton, Georgia, 1931–2020), Two Pines #2, 1964, oil on canvas, High Museum of Art, Atlanta, gift of David C. and Thelma G. Driskell, 2000.203. © Estate of David C. Driskell.

Michelle Holzapfel is a self-taught woodworker who combines woodturning and carving methods to craft irregular, asymmetrical forms, deviating from the symmetry of traditional woodturning. This sculpture, for example, appears as though woven from leaves. From her Vermont studio, Holzapfel sources local hardwood trees with burls—the “bulge on a tree, as benign as a wart,” in the artist’s words—to make her sculptures. “Polishing reveals the wild beauty of the burl’s irregular growth patterns,” she says. “I use their irregularity as an opportunity to create a testament to the dynamic forces that shape trees.”

Made by Michelle Holzapfel (American, born Woonsocket, Rhode Island, 1951), Restless Leaves Vase, 1988, cherry burl, High Museum of Art, Atlanta, gift of Martha and Pat Connell, 2014.407.

Alice Ravenel Huger Smith (American, born Charleston, South Carolina, 1876–1958), The Ashepoo Swamp, early twentieth century, watercolor on paper, High Museum of Art, Atlanta, J. J. Haverty Collection, 25.2.