This image shows a painting which is framed in a pigmented pastel beige cream panel that includes fragments of earth and rocks from the sites where the paintings were made. The composition draws the viewer to meditate on a pile of dry slivery sticks, stacked on a curry-nutmeg-peach colored ground, at sunset or sunrise. The ground itself is painted in shades of peach, yellow, and brown with purple, gray and blue chalky shadows. The gray sticks are a densely stacked pile of straight, curved, and oddly shaped pieces of small tree branches that are sawed and frayed on the edges, splaying in all directions of the picture plane without any context. The twigs are formed with linear hash marks, curvilinear lines, squiggles, dots and swathes of color in pastel shades of gray, blue, lavender, green, yellow, peach, pink, brown, white, and cream.

Sticks

ArtistJosephine Halvorson
Year2020
Dimensions24 x 20 inches (61 x 50.8 cm)
MediumGouache and site material on panels
CreditCourtesy of the artist and Sikkema Jenkins & Co., New York

I made this painting of sticks just above the Rio Chama. It took several days to paint, and each night I would go to bed and hear the strong winds, convinced that the sticks were going to be gone by morning. I was struck by how dry and silvery they looked, like a pile of animal bones left to bleach in the sun. My father had just died from COVID the month before and I think of this painting as a memorial to him and so many lost to the pandemic.

―Josephine Halvorson, August 2021