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White Mountain Patriarch by Peter Holbrook
Photo CreditCarol M. Highsmith Photography
White Mountain Patriarch
Photo CreditCarol M. Highsmith Photography

White Mountain Patriarch

Artist
Year1998
Classification painting
Medium oil on canvas
Dimensions72 x 48 in. (182.9 x 121.9 cm)
Credits Commissioned through the Art in Architecture Program
Fine Arts Collection
U.S. General Services Administration
Location
  • During the 1970s, old and gnarled trees were frequently the subjects of Peter Holbrook's paintings.  In the 1980s and 1990s, most of his landscape subjects were of the topography of the Southwest; tightly cropped canyon scenes that attempted to capture the uniqueness of particular natural environments.  Although the subject of White Mountain Patriarch seems to reprise that of his earlier work, Holbrook considers the formal elements of this painting - the weathered and stratified surfaces - to be an extension of his more recent canyon images.  The subject of Patriarch is an ancient bristlecone pine tree located at an elevation of about 11,000 feet in the Inyo National Forest.  Among the oldest of living things (some specimens are over 4,000 years old), these trees have survived by retreating to a habitat so dry, cold, and wind-blasted that no competing flora or fauna dares to follow.  Yet these trees teeter on the brink of extinction.  To Holbrook, these endangered pines are symbolic of our society's ambivalent relationship with the natural environment.