One late afternoon in July 2024, painter Nicole Wittenberg was lured off path while walking the Maiden Cliff Trail, near Camden, in Maine’s Midcoast region, where she has a studio and has spent summers for more than a decade. What drew her attention was how the sun lit up the dense forest from behind. She sat on the ground amid the dark, overgrown foliage and, delving into the bag of art supplies she has ever at the ready, captured the vibrancy of the raking light filtering through the trees in a series of pastels on paper. Her favorite from that drawing session is Quick Trees.
The lap-size piece renders a tilting chorus line of vertiginous trees with interlacing branches in a heightened palette of Mars Violet, taupe and magenta. The colors protrude into the shadowy foreground, where they mingle with abstracted leafy forms in green, pink and coral. Gestural dashes of sky blue and brilliant chartreuse penetrate the canopy of trees, electrifying the scene.
“Maine is always a big shock for me in the summertime because the foliage is so lively,” says Wittenberg, who otherwise works out of a studio in New York’s Chinatown. “So, I really wanted the energy and activity of this explosive green event as light hit the trees and moved through the leaves.” The artist is speaking while contemplating the pastel at Acquavella, where “All the Way,” the first exhibition of her paintings at the Upper East Side gallery since joining its roster, is up through December 5.
“Nicole’s landscapes, both in paint and pastel, capture the sensation and feeling of being immersed in nature,” says Eleanor Acquavella. “And this drawing, in particular, reveals her deep connection to the coastal landscape of Maine.” Before coming to Manhattan, Quick Trees was displayed at the Ogunquit Museum of American Art in one of two overlapping solo shows of Wittenberg’s work mounted earlier this year in Maine, the other one being at the Center for Maine Contemporary Art, in Rockland.
The 46-year-old artist, who grew up just north of San Francisco and studied painting at the San Francisco Art Institute before moving to New York, considers her works on paper standalone pieces, not studies. “The pastels are about an immediate engagement with the world around me,” says Wittenberg, who bought her first portable box of pastels, at the suggestion of the artist Chantal Joffe, for a trip to Greece in 2017 that marked a turning point in her practice.
The spirit of these fast, uncensored plein air pastels informs the mood and tone of her oils on canvas, in which voluptuous roses or hydrangeas may be pushed to the foreground, their monumental forms painted quickly, using brooms to move around the liquid medium, in the confines of her studio. Examples of these towering, visceral botanicals are also on view at Acquavella, as are several smaller canvases from Wittenberg’s “Gardens of Courances” series, whose allées of high-keyed pink and purples trees, the artist says, were directly influenced by the rhythm and Fauvist palette of Quick Trees.
Wittenberg has attempted several times to scale up the full image of Quick Trees on canvas but feels the results so far haven’t lived up to the drawing. “It’ll happen,” she insists. “I’m going to keep trying until I can do it.”
