Ferida Wolff’s Backyard Discovers A Museum Tree

 

 A Museum Tree

Trees and neighborhoods mature together.

Many of the trees were planted near the curb and have grown so big, with expanding roots, that they started raising the cement nearby and had to be removed. They are also often taken down when they interfere with above-ground wiring.

Sometimes trees reach their life span and start losing their leaves, eventually remaining as just a trunk with bare branches. Most of the time they will be chopped by the township and no one will know that they had once been providing beauty and shade and nesting places for local birds.

So it was quite the surprise when I came upon the trunk of a dead tree that was artfully transformed!

It was sculpted and painted and stood as something that could be in a museum. It was a delight to see and it made me remember that we can be creative in all sorts of ways.

I am delighted each time I pass that tree and I hope that other residents appreciate it as well.  

Copyright Ferida Wolff for SeniorWomen.com

 
Van Gogh’s Cypresses is the first exhibition to focus on the trees — among the most famous in the history of art — immortalized in signature images by Vincent van Gogh (1853–1890).

Such iconic pictures as Wheat Field with Cypresses and The Starry Night take their place as the centerpiece in a presentation that affords an unprecedented perspective on a motif virtually synonymous with the Dutch artist’s fiercely original power of expression.

Some 40 works illuminate the extent of his fascination with the region’s distinctive flamelike evergreens as they successively sparked, fueled, and stoked his imagination over the course of two years in the South of France: from his initial sightings of the “tall and dark” trees in Arles to realizing their full, evocative potential (“as I see them”) at the asylum in Saint-Rémy.

Juxtaposing landmark paintings with precious drawings and illustrated letters — many rarely, if ever, lent or exhibited together — this tightly conceived thematic exhibition offers an extraordinary opportunity to appreciate anew some of Van Gogh’s most celebrated works in a context that reveals the backstory of their invention for the first time.

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