"Pine and Moon," David Driskell

David C. Driskell (United States, 1931-2020), Pine and Moon, 1971, oil on masonite, 47 3/8 x 35 1/8 inches. Museum purchase with support from the Friends of the Collection, 2011.4. Image courtesy of Pillar Digital Imaging. © Estate of David C. Driskell. Courtesy DC Moore Gallery, New York

Find me at Coastal Maine Botanical Gardens!

Pine trees are one of David Driskell’s most beloved subjects and he has described them as inherently spiritual. Driskell attended Maine’s Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in the summer of 1953, his junior year at Howard University in Washington, D.C. Like many other artists, Driskell sought to develop a balance of abstraction and figurative painting. Yet he also drew inspiration from the art historical traditions of the African diaspora, and found in the subject of pine trees under moonlight an image drawn from both these traditions and his immediate environment in Maine, transcending the specific environment of his adopted home and representing an iconic, even spiritual, image.