The paintings draw upon two natural but disparate processes: the gestural unfolding and leafing of a branching tree limb, and the physical properties and behaviors of paint pigments.
My intention is to recreate conditions under which I intimately observe natural forces.
My fascination with trees has been life-long. Most recently it originated from a week I spent at a rural silent meditation retreat. Spring was slowly awakening the landscape from its winter bareness. Each day I sat next to a window in meditative silence. As my city mindset quieted, I was transfixed as tender buds and leaves daily transformed a gnarly elm tree outside. My paintings evoke the immediacy of that experience as my paintbrush slowly reanimates the twisting and branching drawn line of a tree limb.
The paintings originate from photographs I take while walking around my city or traveling. Using these images as a starting point, I carefully draw them onto the large sheets of translucent Mylar, taking care to stay true to the original image. I have found that nature, as it is, is far more exciting than any tree or branch I could conjure.
Not so with the painting’s color. I freely play with the artificial – a blue branch, a salmon hued gingko leaf, candy colored yellow-green maple. I explore shifting pigments, vivid colors in fragile veils, and transparent layers in contrast to dense clotted pools of color.
I work with acrylic paint thinned to an ink-like consistency and my brush entices puddles onto skeletal branches, leaf clusters and flower petals. As the liquid paint dries, the individual pigments reassert themselves, separating and forming unexpected, distinctive abstract patterns. The colors I choose for each painting are the result of hundreds of trial studies and allow me to explore different levels of color concentration and separation affected by the distinctive pigment origins, weights, and by the shapes of individual elements.
The painting is adhered to a Plexiglas layered panel allowing light to travel past the Mylar surface and bounce back behind the painting, retaining a subtle translucency. For me, the many areas of white space in the painting preserve the experience of looking up through the branches and leaves into the infinite sky above.