Driskell first attended Skowhegan as a student in 1953. Driskell was deeply moved by his time at the school, which he found to be enormously communal and welcoming, but with fundamental requirement that all be serious about art. Among Driskell’s cohort that year was a young Robert Clark, later known as famous pop artist Robert Indiana.

When Driskell began teaching art some years later—first at Talladega College, and later Howard University, Fisk University, and the University of Maryland—he recurrently encouraged his students to pursue attending Skowhegan. Among these students who took up the challenge are Mary Lovelace O’Neal and Sylvia Snowden, who went in 1963 and 1964 respectively.

Driskell was invited back as faculty in 1976, 1978, 1991, and 2004. He served on the Board of Governors from 1975 to 1989, the Board of Trustees from 1989 to 2001, and the Advisory Committee from 2003 until his death in 2020.

The landscape of Maine remained important to Driskell throughout his adult life, even outside of his time with Skowhegan. He put a downpayment on a cabin in Maine in 1962 and maintained a second studio there for more than fifty years. The studio was surrounded by pine and white birch trees, observed by “White Birches” (1986).

The linear, parallel forms in this piece recall motifs he recurrently revisited even in abstraction, inspired both by nature and by culture which Driskell experienced in his time in Africa as well as Brazil, as discussed in the previous section.