Young Pines Growing, 1959, Oil on canvas, Clark Atlanta University Art Museum, John Hope Franklin Purchase Award

Audio Description

Young Pines Growing is an oil on canvas. It was painted in 1959. It is in the collection of the Clark Atlanta University Art Museum.

This is a vertical abstract oil painting on canvas called Young Pines Growing. It has a light blue background with layers of dark and light green patches mixed with dark brown lines. It is as if an image of a pine tree in nature has suddenly exploded into several pieces, almost with the same texture and the arrangement of a stained-glass window. The most concentrated part of the painting is in the middle and the lower thirds. A few vertical lines nearly run the length of the canvas and there are short horizontal lines, some straight and others diagonal. The middle is mostly various shades of pale green, olive, and forest green that make way toward the bottom for brown, nearly rectangular shapes.

Label Copy

Young Pines Growing is an oil on canvas. It was painted in 1959. It is in the collection of the Clark Atlanta University Art Museum, acquired via the John Hope Franklin Purchase Award.

Driskell entered Young Pines Growing into the eighteenth Atlanta University Annual, a juried competition established in 1942 by Hale Woodruff at Atlanta University (now Clark Atlanta University). The entry received the John Hope Franklin Purchase Award for best landscape. Driskell’s award-winning composition, more symbolic than representational, traces the agile slim trunks of the pines and their pale new growth against a bright, open sky. The competition provided critical exposure for African American artists and a national stage for artists in the region, such as Driskell, who was then on the faculty of Talladega College.

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