Although the faces of many Driskell figures, including some self-portraits, are informed by African mask forms, Driskell drew distinctions. This is most evident in his titles, such as Faces in the Forest (2004; p. 27) and Mystery of the Masks. Faces may represent African ancestors, but not every face is a mask. The mask is an ancestral form that is empowered by successive generations. “Power is transmitted to a mask from ancestors,” Driskell wrote in 1970, and “this helps preserve the spiritual quality which enables the right function of the mask to be fulfilled.”14 Interpreted holistically, across his oeuvre, Driskell gives us compositions in which the human and the divine coexist. African masks, ancestors, and nature in its earthly and celestial forms, take residence in Driskell’s creative realm.
T FOREST THE DRISKELL ATTENDED the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in
Maine in 1953. It was professionally formative and an introduction to a state he would later call home. In 1961, the Driskell family purchased property in Falmouth, Maine, which provided a summer home and studio for the artist. Over the years, Driskell developed a bountiful garden that included ornamental flowers, memorial trees, flowering shrubs, vegetables and fruits. The gardens provided sustenance of many kinds— edible, spiritual, and visual — and abutted his stand-alone studio. The studio was the perfect place to dream and to “make visible that which was never intended to be in the natural process.”15 Hence, Driskell conveyed nature— the gardens and nearby woodlands, through stylized form. The greenery in Palm Sunday bears little resemblance to palms, and the dancing fronds that appear in A View from the Forest (2005; p. 21) and Night Garden (Forest Dream) (2012; p. 25) only imply a forest of ferns. The decorative impulse evoked in these cut-outs are robust complements to the curvilinear embellishments laid down by brush. A side-by-side consideration of the sumptuous drawing in the 2005 Adam and Eve in the Garden (Study) (p. 17) with the collage technique in A View from the Forest foregrounds his decorative methods and ingenuity. Driskell attributed his eye for such ornament to the classical acanthus leaf décor used throughout the ancient world, connecting his artistic inheritance to traditions beyond borders and simple chronologies.
The Seer, 2005. Collage and gouache on paper, 30 x 22 1⁄2 inches 18
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