About TREEHOUSE, the birth of a concept
There have been artists who have used one object in each of their paintings, usually as an identifier; like a butterfly, or a rose, and Enrique uses the never changing Blue Dog in each one of his. However Dan Fuller uses his always different Treehouse in each of his paintings, not as its subject but as a vehicle in order to portray his subject. Since a tree house is really a state of mind and can be anything one wants it to be, it knows no limitations. So Dan adopted that freedom in order to portray any subject that intrigues him, in whatever style or school that best captures its essence. Indeed using a tree house as his vehicle even inspires him to paint subjects no one has ever considered as such.
For years he had been doing paintings based on ideas, and using whatever technique that worked best for the subject, but he knew they would never be totally accepted. In fact repeatedly changing techniques is usually a sign of artistic immaturity, so Dan had to find a way to overcome that limitation. Then one late Fall day in upstate New York, he did a plain air landscape that included a tree, but it had a tree house platform in it, so Dan treated that merely as an incidental point of interest, but he didn‘t think it had any importance other than as adding to the painting‘s ambience.
He had absolutely no clue where that would lead him.
That evening he started an experimental watercolor of a tree looking up through its branches, but when its sketch was completed, he felt it needed more. So influenced by the simple platform in the tree from that afternoon, he added that, but it definitely needed more, so he put a shack on it, and that looked a lot like a fisherman’s shack he’d painted in Rockport Massachusetts a few weeks before. So he made the platform into a pier by adding some log pilings then he put a couple of boats floating in the air beside it. And each object he added suggested others, so that painting virtually morphed into being the first of the Treehouse Collection. Of course it was the result of Dan’s almost overwhelming desire to be able to paint any subject in any school or technique he chose as he had been, but do it in a manner that had the kind of integrity that painters that work in one technique and school their whole lives enjoy
It is unique.
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