Old Wounds

This Old Wounds tree painting confronts the viewer immediately and without apology. Dean Gioia places a massive, scarred trunk at the center of the canvas, its split crown and hollow cavities forming a face-like visage that is equal parts unsettling and deeply compelling. The tree has survived — storms, lightning, the slow violence of time — and every mark on its surface says so.

The composition is close and direct. Gioia gives the tree no comfortable distance; it fills the 30×24-inch canvas with physical force, the forking limbs reaching toward the upper edges while the root mass disappears into a darkened forest floor tangled with dry grass and fallen debris. A cool teal sky peeks through the upper left, and the middle distance reveals a shadowed woodland of vertical trunks receding into deep green — but none of that background competes with the presence of this tree.

What makes this painting exceptional is how Gioia handles the bark itself. Layers of gray, warm white, and earth tones are dragged and worked into a surface that reads almost sculpturally. The knotholes — one near the crown, one at mid-trunk — are rendered with a darkness that pulls the eye and holds it. They give the tree its character: watchful, worn, enduring.

This is landscape painting operating well beyond documentation. Gioia is not recording a tree — he is excavating what trees carry. Age, damage, resilience, the strange beauty that only comes from things that have lasted. The title is earned. These are old wounds, and the tree wears them with the authority of something that has simply outlasted whatever caused them.

Old Wounds is an original acrylic on canvas, 30×24 inches, and arrives framed and ready to hang. An outstanding work for collectors drawn to expressive, character-driven landscape painting.

Available exclusively at deangioia.com.