From 1937 until his death, Marsden Hartley painted annually in his native state of Maine, returning each year to a landscape that he described as "strong, simple, stately" and "brutal." He adopted a boldly expressionistic, deliberately "primitive" style to convey his powerful response to this rugged, forbidding landscape. In Ghosts of the Forest, random piles of driftwood, bleached into pale, spectral shapes by exposure to the elements, dominate the foreground.
