Painted Wood Sculpture

At some point after making impermanent installations for many years, I decided that I wanted to make sculpture that was more permanent. In 1986, I received a grant from the Cambridge Arts Council to make the transition from tempoary installation sculpture using natural materials to more permanent  wood construction sculpture. I began creating a body of work that included brightly colored, eight-foot, painted wood sculptures of trees. Individually, each tree possessed a unique, totemic personality, some anthropomorphic, some ritualistic. Together, the trees produced a magical space apart from our technological society, reminding us of the wonder and uniqueness of the antural world.

The following are excerpts from newspaper articles written about exhibitions of this body of painted wood sculpture.

Royal Palm

"Marsha Hewitt's three abstract trees in wood and enamel are exuberant but always elegant. Though immediately appealing, Hewitt has a formal intelligence that raises them above the merely pleasant." - Miles Unger, Art New England, October/November 1991 regarding the "Homage to Wood: The Tree as Image" at the Art Complex Museum, Duxbury, MA

"Her colors are impudently primary red! green! rainbows! Her forms are simplistic, but accurate: "Royal Palm," for example with its spiral-striped red trunk and high green crown, captures the essence of the species." - Marty Carlock, The Wayland-Weston Town Crier, April, 1987 regarding the "Magic Spaces" exhibition at the Chapel Gallery, West Newton, MA

 "The Royal Palm" 

Painted Wood Sculpture 

101 1/2 x 24 x 24",  1987

"Samba" 

Painted Wood Sculpture

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The Raven Shrine

During this time, I also created smaller sculptures and works that hung on walls. In the wall constructions, I endeavored to create a sense of ritual, drama and mystery that invited the viewer to imagine his or her own myth.

Some of these pieces had facades that revolved, so that the viewer was able to view two totally different sculptures, as in The Raven Shrine and City/Country Box. 

  "The Raven Shrine" - Front 1

Painted Wood Sculpture

27 x 29 x 17" 1987

  "The Raven Shrine" -Front 2

Painted Wood Sculpture

27 x 29 x 17" 1987 

The Fire Within and In the Night Garden

Christine Temin wrote about two of these pieces, The Fire Within and In the Night Garden: "Hewitt's works have a childlike boldness, crayon colors and simple shapes. Her subjects are smooth abstractions of nature, trees, grass, flames, stars, adorned with striking patterns. In The Fire Within, a small wall piece, a ladder perched on the top promises escape from the flames. Another small piece, In the Night Garden, features a tree writhing upward toward a large crescent moon. A picket fence locates the scene in a cozy backyard; a large blue egg on the ground adds mystery." - Christine Temin, "Ample Space for Big, Bold Work", Boston Globe, February 1987 regarding the "Magic Spaces" exhibition at the Chapel Gallery, West Newton, MA.

"In the Night Garden"

Painted Wood Sculpture

24 x 12 x 12 1/2", 1988

"The Fire Within"

Painted Wood Sculture

24 x 12 x 12 1/2", 1988 

Forest in a Box

"These enamel pieces in wood are a strong departure from her earlier, ritual works. An exception is Forest in a Box. Its three painted twigs can be slid out of a cheesebox or slid back in and locked up. For me, this functioned as a metaphor of our society's relationship with nature: prune it and compartmentalize it." - Marty Carlock, Art New England, April 1987 regarding the "Magic Spaces" exhibition at the Chapel Gallery, West Newton, MA

  "The Forest in a Box" 

Painted Wood Sculpture

12 x 7 x 2 1/2", 1988  

  "The Forest in a Box" 

Painted Wood Sculpture