Blue Tree III 2010

Romul Nutiu made this painting of a ‘Blue Tree’ with oil on canvas, and you can almost feel the painting coming into being, shifting and emerging through trial, error, and intuition. I sympathize with Nutiu, imagining him standing before the canvas, maybe lost in thought, maybe just improvising. He lays down this network of blue lines, the color so intense it vibrates. Some strokes are thick, juicy, and loaded with pigment, while others are thin, almost transparent, like whispers of color. Look at how he uses these brushstrokes to build up this crazy, tangled web of branches. They create a feeling of depth and complexity, of getting lost in the woods. Nutiu is in conversation with other painters. You can see echoes of Van Gogh’s obsessive mark-making in the swirling branches, or maybe even hints of Symbolism in the tree’s otherworldly hue. Painting is an embodied expression which embraces ambiguity, allowing for multiple interpretations and meaning.