In trees, fresh perspective for Fruitlands

"At the end somehow it falls together," said painter Zsuzsanna Szegedi, stepping back to look over her portrait of a tremendous, storm-ravaged white pine standing conspicuously alone on the grounds of the Fruitlands Museum in Harvard.

The museum known for its grasp of New England history is expecting Szegedi to provide a fresh breath of contemporary art this season. She'll paint at Fruitlands throughout the summer in the museum's artist-in-residence program, now in its third year, said Michael Volmar, the curator of collections. Previous artists in the program were a poet and a sculptor.

"We're looking for new ways to explore the land and the collections," said Volmar. What does that mean? That's for Szegedi to figure out. "We don't really know what an artist is going to produce."

The paintings Szegedi creates this summer will go on display at a Fruitlands exhibition planned for September, titled "The Lure of Trees." She will also be sharing techniques for painting outdoors during a workshop today from noon to 4 p.m. at the museum on Prospect Hill Road.

The museum takes its name from a short-lived experimental society called Fruitlands, which was founded on the land in 1843 by Bronson Alcott, father of the writer Louisa May Alcott. The Alcott family and about a dozen other people moved to Harvard to live off the fruits of the land in what was to be a communal agricultural utopia. The community lasted just seven months, but a bit of its spirit remains.

The point of the museum's artist-in-residence program, noted Volmar, is to excite people about the arts and humanities. "Perhaps those seemingly more modest goals hold true to some portion of Alcott's ideals as he set out to create a 'new Eden' here at Fruitlands," he said.

Szegedi knows trees; they have been among her favorite subjects for 10 years. Her most recent painting of the museum's iconic white pine is her fourth portrait of that particular tree, and maybe not the last.

"This tree seems to struggle the most," she said. "It seems like it's calling my name, 'Come paint me . . .' "

The giant white pine, some 60 feet high and around 4 feet through the trunk, had been among the best climbing trees on the museum's more than 200 acres of land. But that was before December's massive ice storm sheared off two huge lower limbs, leaving the tree with bright white scars dripping with sap.

"The most important thing with a tree is the character I see in it," said Szegedi. In the hulking white pine she sees a "protective" character. "But now, even something that can be protective can be destroyed." The storm that spoiled the tree's symmetry "adds to the character and demonstrates how it survives.

"Look up at the deformities in the branches; this tree may have lived through many storms."

Szegedi is 33. She is originally from Hungary and studied art at Janus Pannonius University in her native country. She visited America in 1997, in part to improve her English skills to satisfy a university language requirement. What was supposed to be a few months of independent study turned into a long stay. She continued her studies at the Massachusetts College of Art and Design in Boston, and met her husband. They live in Hudson. Szegedi teaches conceptual drawing at MassArt.

Her interest in painting trees began around 1999. "I was trying to get away from what I had been working on," she said. The urban landscapes she had been painting weren't organic enough, she thought, with all the manmade angles.

She found new inspiration in trees. Standing beneath them, "You see how small you are. You smell it. Something drips on you."

Last year, she did a project she called "Presence/Absence," for which she painted trees from rural and urban settings on long panels, and then juxtaposed two panels as if to make one tree. She did a series in 2006-07, "Forest Removed," in which she painted trees in isolation, using white space as part of the background, which has become her style.

"I wasn't planning to paint this many trees," she said. "But every painting gave me a new idea for the next one. Trees are easy to work with. They don't talk back. They don't criticize." And the artist doesn't have to pay them to sit still for four hours, roughly the time it takes her to make a portrait.

Szegedi set out recently to paint the museum's white pine on a misty, overcast morning. A wild turkey strutted through a nearby field. Szegedi placed her easel close to the tree. She likes to get close to whatever she paints. "That's how you take the viewer to where you are standing."

The tree was soaked from overnight rain. Szegedi loved the green lichen on the bark. She loved the holes pecked by birds. She loved the sticky sap bleeding in slow motion from the tree's wounds. She loved the way a drop of water from high in the branches falls at a perfect right angle to the ground, and shows that the trunk is curved.

Her tree paintings are abstract and full of bright tones. She spends a long time mixing her colors to create the right hue.

"I'm trying to find a color that is not the color of the tree yet represents the wet bark," she said. "I'm emphasizing some colors that are there but are not so dominant. I'm magnifying little details that I find to support my composition and support the character of this tree."

Sometimes people who watch Szegedi paint will say they don't understand what she's trying to do. Why not paint a tree as it looks in nature? "I think of art as an inventive process rather than a documentary process," Szegedi explained.

"We know what trees look like. Why would I paint them as they are? I want to capture something about trees we don't know about them, or something I don't know about them."

Poet Susan Edwards Richmond of Acton was the first artist-in-residence in the Fruitlands program, in 2007. "It gave me the opportunity and the excuse to spend a lot of time in a really gorgeous place," she said.

The museum's setting on Prospect Hill offers broad views of the valleys around it. Its collections include a fine art gallery, a gallery of Native American artifacts, and the world's first Shaker museum, devoted to the lives of the men and women of the religious sect that peaked in the mid-19th century, according to Fruitlands.

Richmond spent a lot of time in the galleries, especially the Shaker collection, which inspired and fueled her writing, she said.

She's pleased that the museum continues to promote contemporary art on its grounds. Fruitlands is "an under-known" resource, she said, unique for being "a museum focused on a place; it's a New England place, a place for our history and people."

Szegedi has been thinking about how her work connects to Fruitlands' idealistic origins.

"It didn't take me long to realize that the contemporary aspect of their thinking is the common ground," she said. The utopians who founded Fruitlands, and others like them, were constantly breaking from the mainstream.

"Even though none of these utopian communities survived, they now remind us that spurring out from the norm was always part of the big picture," said Szegedi. "It's a big cycle, people who dream out loud and speak up have an important role in the society; they show us alternative ways and values to cherish and inspire us to break new ground.

"I'm super-sensitive to the overlooked individual's dysfunctional role in society, which might be the reason for my attachment to the beautiful yet disfigured trees in nature."

Details about the Fruitlands Museum, its collections and scheduled events are available at www.fruitlands.org.