Sandra Allen draws highly detailed and carefully rendered images of individual trees. Her charcoal and pencil drawings are large scale, often 6 feet (1.8meters) in height or more.
Allen received a BFA from UMass Dartmouth School of Art and an MFA from Yale University School of Art; and is represented in the collections of the Museum of Fine Arts Boston, The Fogg Art Museum, Harvard University and the Yale University Art Gallery, among others.
In 2001 she started her series of tree drawings which she likens to “portraits”. They are represented without their foliage, and she revels in their structure as revealed by shadows of the forms overlapping other forms.
Her work is currently on exhibit at the New Britain Museum of American Art until January 24, 2010.
Trees and their structure play a large part in the life of an artist, and she does these masterfully, or at least those that I’ve seen. The scale is astounding to me. The first thing I thought of when I saw these and realized how large they were was J. R. R. Tolkein’s “Leaf By Niggle”, a wonderful story about an artist who loves to paint leaves.
Any artist who misses out on this story has not made it through Trees 101. He wasn’t a bad artist either, but Tolkein grabbed me with this one.
Small correction:
6 ft = 1.80 m
Cheers.
Right you are. Thanks.