WILLOWS
ARTHUR DOVE, 1940
Okay, start with this. Arthur Dove lives on a boat. Not in a romantic, rich-guy, linen-shirt way. He's broke. He and Helen Torr, who everyone called Reds, pull into Huntington Harbor on a forty-two-foot sailboat and more or less make that their life for years. No house. Not much money. Just the boat, the water, the weather. Which, for Dove, kind of makes sense. He's often called the first American painter to go abstract. But Dove doesn't feel like he's trying to escape nature. He's trying to get further inside it. Trees, wind, water, light. But not painted straight. He had his own word for it: extractions. Meaning, not the willow tree. The thing the willow does to you. Great word, actually. Extraction. Like he's pulling the feeling out of the place and leaving the regular tree behind. And look where this painting puts you. You're not across from the willows. You're under them. They're over your head. Dark green, heavy, curling in. The branches don't just hang there. They lean. They press. It feels like the whole tree is slowly closing around you. Then there's that pale shape in the middle. Look at it. A few dark squares. One looks like a little four-pane window. Something lower down feels like a door. Maybe it's a house. Maybe it's just a break in the trees. A way through. But once you see the house, it's hard to unsee it. By the time Dove paints this, the boat is gone. His health is bad. He and Reds are living in a tiny one-room cottage in Centerport, right on the edge of a pond, wrapped in trees. It used to be a post office and general store. One room. One pond. The willows. That's basically the whole kingdom. So maybe that pale thing is their place, half-swallowed by the trees. Or half-protected by them. He doesn't tell us. Good for him. And the reason he could keep painting at all was this guy named Duncan Phillips. Phillips sends him fifty bucks a month, every month, for first pick of the paintings. Not exactly a fortune. But enough to keep going. Now read the label. Gift of Duncan Phillips. Not bad for fifty bucks.