Woods Walk:
Paintings by Nancy Tobin

Broken Geometry by Nancy Tobin ©2021 Mixed media on paper

Trees have fascinated me since my earliest family camping vacations in the Michigan woods.

I was shy kid, often in my own world; looking at the sky through green lace captured my imagination. When I look for inspiration, it always takes me to the woods.

Shadows and light can make the mundane extraordinary. The way the stained-glass windows illuminated the vaulted arches of my childhood church, St. Alphonsus, evoked the same awe I experience when shifting light strikes tree trunks to create radiant movement. 

Tree forms started showing up in my work in the early 2000s, while working in Maplewood, NJ, a leafy town just across the Hudson River from Manhattan. When I worked on fantastical landscapes of my imagination, branches would start poking through. 

Since my return to Michigan, I’ve thought a lot about “branching” as a process. Branches (tactile and natural, like forests; constructed by people, like highway systems; or conceptual, like family trees) grow by splitting into new configurations. And the space between those branches is full of magical light.

Trees are gorgeous megaliths and beacons of hope. As we tumble and fumble forward through time they are here to remind me that our lives are interconnected. 

Woods Walk is a series of (mostly) watercolors.While the subject is natural and then representational, this series is as much about process and my endless fascination with paint. Besides their role in traditional landscape studies, watercolors on paper are more intimate than oils or acrylic, and they felt more fragile — like our world.