Henrietta shore was one of LA’s early moderns. She broke away from the scenic painters of nature, to concentrate on a single plant or tree or leaf. This was a giant step at the time: to paint a simple plant without its surrounding reality was the beginning of the reductive abstraction that American art is famous for (for more on this read LA’s Early Moderns, first chapter by Victoria Daily). Unfortunately, history has allowed only one female artist in this area and so while they are still writing books on Okeefe., Shore is covered in cobwebs to almost all except the people working at Sotheby’s. Unlike Okeefe’s repetitive vaginal meanderings through a pastel desert, Shore’s paintings were about the soul of the plant itself, the strength of a plant to grow patiently in one spot for years, or depictions of an Indian girl carrying water on her head. Shore’s color is intense like that of a small ordinary California plant blooming on the ground with a green like no other green ever seen before, like that of an emerald discovered in the dark velvet corner of your Aunt’s jewelry box.
The first picture I saw of Shore’s is also the picture that made me fall in love with her work. It is a drawing of a tree, but it is also a drawing of strength and nobility, if trees can claim nobility and I think they can. The strength comes from all the wrong things –- The picture is only ten by twelve inches small, it’s a simple pencil and paper drawing of stark black and white, a tree standing alone without the surrounding earth or sky to accompany it. The real strength of this drawing comes from the fact that the tree is actually two trees that threaten to tear apart the whole but instead they join together in a unity that is stronger than any single tree. The theme of unity from Eastern religions was popular in Shore’s time and I don’t think this was an accident on her part, Rather it is a cry against the binary system that gives us good verses evil, a system that separates us from the god head, a curse that forbids us to fly with the angels but prohibits us from running with the animals. But without the binary system we would be lost, without cold how could we ever describe hot, and without struggle we would not have such a thing as unity – we would only have a fat tree.
Artillery Magazine Vol 2 no. 5 May/June 2008