This ongoing body of ink paintings on paper explores intimately the sensation of being present with trees. I paint in detail specific trees encountered during daily life walking the streets of Brooklyn, on travels, and on visits to my childhood city of Louisville, Kentucky. The trees are poetic markers of place and time. They stand for specific memories from my life. Drawing trees became an important pastime during the pandemic when I spent significant time exploring the urban parks around my home with my children. While I stood apart from them, watching them play among, commune with, and climb the trees in imagination and escape, I also felt at peace for brief moments of time, “forest bathing,” allowing the stillness and seeming timelessness of the life of trees to soothe the troubled present.
While the trees signify moments of beauty, they contain elements of loss and anxiety. Within the titles of each work is the allusion to the impermanence of the subject from which these paintings are inspired. The paintings are memorials. The summer of 2022 was a time of great drought and stress on the natural landscape of New York City. By 2023, many mature trees were unable to withstand the stresses that man-made climate change have brought upon them. Drought, insect invasion, fungus and bacterial infections, have led to the loss of thousands of trees in NYC alone. On my walks through the urban parks and city blocks, on drives out to the ocean, I have witnessed these trees wither and die. These paintings seek to immortalize the trees before they are lost to time. Viewed together, the works become a forest.
While the trees signify moments of beauty, they contain elements of loss and anxiety. Within the titles of each work is the allusion to the impermanence of the subject from which these paintings are inspired. The paintings are memorials. The summer of 2022 was a time of great drought and stress on the natural landscape of New York City. By 2023, many mature trees were unable to withstand the stresses that man-made climate change have brought upon them. Drought, insect invasion, fungus and bacterial infections, have led to the loss of thousands of trees in NYC alone. On my walks through the urban parks and city blocks, on drives out to the ocean, I have witnessed these trees wither and die. These paintings seek to immortalize the trees before they are lost to time. Viewed together, the works become a forest.