David Flood

“Your art’s good is to follow nature insofar as it can.”
-Dante’s Inferno (Canto XI)

My work leads me into forests to encounter how the fundamental forces of nature act on the figure of wood. Lightning strikes a tree, wind or rain batter it, frost heaves its roots. Ice breaks limbs from trunks, legions of ants leave their calligraphic prints on the soft wood beneath the bark, man and machine wade through…all and alike leaving behind dead wood. This for me is the vineyard of creative destruction where, to begin, the act of seeing is a type of making. First we may see how exterior contours suggest a rhythm, an essence, an evocation of nature’s abstract forms. Then the fifth compass point, in, reveals other spatial realities …holes, cavities, textures, tunnels, knobs, jagged asymmetricality…all part of the inherently transcendental nature of nature. This is the raw material for art of the natural world, where subtle manipulation of the artifacts renders these damaged but beautiful pieces at once works of nature and works of man. The pieces on display here all are from trees and shrubs found in abundance across Massachusetts. This selection consists mainly of red oak, white and red cedar, elm, locust, birch, sugar maple ...