I am getting ready for Loveland show Aug 13-14,

Sculpture in the Park, Benson Gardens

Extend-Air is the acrylic base for the colors. It gives you additional pure acrylic. The light creamy consistency goes on white and dries clear as a base coat or is used when you want to extend the color you have mixed to give you a very slow build up of color when fine control is needed.

Standing on a raw redwood slab base, the vessel was turned from a burl, a gall pushed out from the trunk of the tree that was taken from a large old bur oak (Quercus macrocarpa) growing on the farm of Bob and Susie Baker in Bureau County, Illinois. Cutting the burl off this tree did no damage, the tree is still flourishing. The bur oak roots that form the figure in the vessel were taken from a young sapling as part of a necessary thinning in a large tree plantation on the same farm.

The bur oak is the dominant tree of prairie Illinois. This species often reaches an age of 400 to 600 years, a height of 80 feet and a trunk 2 to 3 feet in diameter. They are becoming increasingly rare, because many of these old venerable trees are today being harvested and turned into pallets, to carry the products of our industrial world. After these pallets are used, they are burned or thrown away.

This piece symbolizes the heart-rending cry of the bur oak community whose members are too often seen by humans as merely standing reserve for anthropocentric desires. The title is reference to Magritte’s painting meant to highlight ironically the many levels of meaning the piece suggests, that of course the piece itself is not a pallet, that bur oak trees are more than just pallets, that the human world should acknowledge and validate these trees as ends in themselves, as beautiful and rightful inhabitants of the prairie ecosystem. It is a piece of pain and tragedy but also of the hope that someone will hear the cry of the bur oak.

Artist: David Nittmann, Boulder Colorado January 2011
Inspiration: Bob Baker, Larch Hill Farm, Kewanee, Illinois