Up close, it recalls an aerial view of land deeply rutted with water-carved canyons. It’s easy to get lost in the details; in the shadows on the right, I glimpsed faces. Stand at the other end of the gallery, and all the odd forms within the giant drawing coalesce into a craggy, slightly leaning portion of what looks like an old elm.
Most of the pieces in this show are considerably smaller than “Ballast,’’ and the contrast in scale can be mind-bending, evincing how size alone can affect a visceral perception of power. “Scion,’’ which depicts a grafted beech tree, shows more of its subject, but unlike “Ballast,’’ it doesn’t dwarf the viewer. At almost 6 feet tall, it’s person-size, but I felt larger than the beech, perhaps because Allen has brought its size down significantly.
The shift in scale also poses a dramatic shift in technique for the artist. “Scion’’ is delicately rendered; the smooth bark looks like skin, creasing at the joints. The tree forks near the bottom, and the two branches evoke a relationship in the way they pull away and then reach toward each other.
Allen photographs her trees, then maps the images onto a grid and draws them. This simple process takes nothing for granted. Anyone can draw a tree; Allen draws portraits.
Visionary details
Nature and landscape are one of the oldest subjects in art and bad landscapes are legion: pretty and trite, iterations of a bland imagined ideal. Good landscapes require deep attention from an artist willing to see something with an original eye. Often, as in Allen’s case, that’s a matter of examining every knot and gnarl. Painter Christopher Armstrong brings that kind of attention to the sea in his works at Clark Gallery.
