Dusti Bongé live oak tree artwork

What defines the visual of the South?

Red brick buildings? Red dirt? Pickup trucks. Magnolia trees?

Having lived in the South most of my 50 years now, I’d suggest the monumental southern live oak tree with its massive arms covered in Spanish moss. I love these trees. I live beside these trees.

Wonderfully, Dusti Bongé picked up the live oak tree as artistic inspiration. Ligia M. Römer, executive director at the Dusti Bongé Art Foundation in Biloxi, MS, introduces us to the artwork.

Dusti Bongé, Untitled (Trees), c. 1938, pastel on paper, 16 ¼” x 12 ¼”

This week we share a very early interpretation by Dusti Bongé of the South’s fabulous live oaks. This pastel drawing is from the late 1930s when Dusti was broadly exploring different styles, various media and a range of subject matters, often inspired by her surroundings.

This work, unlike her later very abstracted Oak Trees in Bloom from the 1950s, offers a much more representational approach to depicting the trees. Definitely not abstract, it is in fact also not realist, but rather more impressionist in style. It captures a moment along the path, when the sunlight hits just right and the mosses and lichens on the tree trunk and branches light up in an array of most unexpected colors. 

Moreover, in this sketch Dusti depicts the graceful and often curly, gnarly, diverging structure of the live oaks with swift marks and fluid lines in yellow, blue, and green. She portrays how their trunks casually lean in different directions and how their enormous branches forge their own paths through the space. This constant interplay between the ever-changing light and the ever-shifting structure of the trees can indeed only be captured in a moment.

This is a sketch that Dusti likely drew during one of her many walks along a trail in the Mississippi woods. She cherished these woods and loved the beauty they had to offer, noting that “Each tree is different and lovely in its own way.”