This painting is inspired by an ancient oak out in west sonoma county on coleman vallery road. I have painted this tree several times, other renditions are on my web-site. It is huge and very old and its trunk is robed in many kinds of moss. This painting are part of a series “ the great oaks” that I have been working on for over 7 years now. All of the paintings in the series are at least 4’ x 6’ and so doing a very small painting of this great oak was a new journey for me, seeing it translated onto an even smaller lable is really interesting. These paintings are inspired by my love for these trees and the very sad fact that we are loosing many to sudden oak death in these last decades. I see the painting on the lable as a kind of Spirit tree.
I spent a lot of time with the tree in the field. I do sketching and just sit and observe the tree in nature for a long time before I paint it. I hope the painting will given evidence of my love for this tree. I was visiting the tree in the winter on a particualarly foggy day and had the idea to have the imagery signature pediment floating in the fog in an unearthly light. This gave rise to the idea of a kind of spirit portrait of this tree. Given the small scale i didn’t want to include too much detail so i just picked some of the larger branches and left the leaves out. WIth a limited form to work with I focused my attention on the trunk with its incredible variety of emerald mosses, like a tapestry, infinite variations on a theme. I like the resonance between that variation and the variation of tastes and textures in a great wine. Cabernet franc is also dark and complex and, for me, fits the image which I really appreciate, it feels like the image and the wine go together!. So I hope the floating pediment that has its own inner light, the mosses on the huge trunk and the gesture of the branches come together with the fog and dark foreground to create an atmosphere of mystery and wonder.
A passionate artist from an early age, Adam Wolpert explored the media of performance, ceramics, sculpture, and collage before turning seriously to painting while earning his BFA from the University of California, Santa Barbara. After a rigorous two-year training in classical realism at Studio Cecil-Graves in Florence, Italy, where he immersed himself in the work of the great European masters, Wolpert completed an MFA at the University of California, San Diego. In 1994 Wolpert moved to Sonoma County and co-founded the Occidental Arts and Ecology Center (OAEC) where he still lives and paints. He has had major gallery representation since 1988, and is now represented by Erickson Fine Art Gallery in Healdsburg, California.
After completing multiple series – including a year spent painting seventy-two iterations of the same composition through four seasons (the Pond Series) – Wolpert’s process led him to explore his relationship with the vanishing great oaks of Sonoma county, through large portraits of the magnificent trees. This series started in 2017 and continues to this day.
