Question 1 – How long have you been making art and what has your journey of art making been like?
Making art has been a life long pursuit for me. In the past I used pastels to do studies for my fiber art. Now that has become my primary medium for my landscapes.
Question 2 – As a Northsider, how much does your environment, your context, your place, impact your art, if at all?
As a Northsider I enjoy the rich diversity of outdoor places to walk. I am particularly drawn to our wilder spaces, our conservation parks and less tended areas like Governor’s Island. I find I can leave my house and in minutes step away from the city and be in a wonderland of nature.
Artist Statement
The woods have stirred my imagination ever since I was a young child exploring the forest near our house in northern Wisconsin. I have vivid memories of how the mosses and mushrooms on fallen logs gave me a sense of the mysteries of birth, destruction, and rebirth. Much later in life, I have returned to this theme in my current work in pastels, a series of expressive “portraits” of trees embodying a shattered midpoint between growth and rejuvenation.
Many of the images you see here are based on photos I have taken in Door County, where it was as though I had rediscovered the forest of my childhood. It was there, along the Green Bay shoreline, that I first became intrigued by the forms of storm-felled cedars lying in disarray on the forest floor. The site is The Clearing Folk School, Ellison Bay, where founder Jens Jensen’s philosophy was to let downed trees lie undisturbed, eventually returning to the earth.
My explorations of local Madison parks—Tenney Park and the Mendota Unit of Cherokee Marsh Conservation Park among them—have yielded further images of fractured trees. I find a powerful beauty in their jarring brokenness, and I have tried to capture visually the sensation of a tree breaking in a violent storm.
In this body of work as well as in my previous fiber art I have sought out dynamic, abstract compositions in unexpected places. There is a connection—a creative throughline—between the architectural geometries I rendered in crochet decades ago and the arrestingly angular trees of my recent pastels. My website elizabethtuttleart.com shows both.
Among my sources of artistic inspiration for this group of pastels are artist friends Jane Goldman and Catherine Kernan, Ben Peyer’s photographs that I saw here at the Overture Center Galleries in 2015, N. C. Wyeth’s illustrations, German Romantic landscapes, plus a little Bob Ross.
