This December I will have four large-scale paintings for sale at The Lookup Gallery along with work by my friend and fellow Colorado Springs artist, Shannon Mello. Shannon and I also collaborated on two paintings for this show. The title of our exhibit is “Overstory”. We both recently read the book, Overstory by Richard Powers, and were deeply impacted by it. We wanted our work to reflect this inspiration, even if very abstractly. “Overstory” is about nine Americans, their unique relationships to trees, and how their love of trees leads them to a life of protecting forests from destruction. I'm reminded of how anything I advocate for begins with personal connection and love.
My own personal connection with trees started when I was in sixth grade at a school camp in the woods. One day we learned that the tree bark of Ponderosa Pines can smell like butterscotch and vanilla. This sensory experience was a revelation.
Then at 14 years old, my family moved from the sparsely treed suburbs on the prairie a bit farther north into more naturally wooded areas of our city. The yard had many densely grouped groves of scrub oak trees among wild grass, years of fallen leaves, and scattered wildflowers. There in our yard, I experienced for the first time, the solace that being alone in nature can provide. I would wander, squeeze through, crawl between and sit among the groves of scrub oak trees; my imagination awakened to what proximity to this landscape inspires.
Coming of age, I learned about my own need for solitude in our busy culture to restore my sensitive spirit. The trees and this landscape became a kind of support network for me through a tender time of life. One time in high school, I brought a new friend to crawl through the scrub oak groves with me. She thought this was weird, but it was the gateway to our lifelong friendship!
So now, I’m inviting you to climb with me into my weird world of abstracting trees and forests with paint on canvas. Since my work is non-representational, you might need to stretch your imagination to see some tree and forest imagery in most of them! As I made each painting, I "climbed through" and sat among all of my stored memories of trees I've loved in the past and present and let my body translate the vastness of visual images into something simplified on canvas.
I imagined myself being tiny and sheltering among the branches of a tree in one painting. One painting could be like a view from high up outside of our atmosphere. The one pictured above is titled “Through a Clearing in the Woods” which captures a bit of my love for wandering among and through the trees. Just like “Overstory” imagines the life of trees, individually and as a whole, through a lens of fiction, I used the lens of abstract art for my interpretation.
Even beyond personal experience, trees are deep in our human consciousness symbolically, and also a vital resource we benefit from every day. They are silent sentinels, the lungs of the earth, quietly breathing and daily offering shelter and inspiration to countless creatures. I hope my work can be a tiny offering of gratitude for such an important part of creation.
The opening reception for this exhibit is Friday, December 2. 5-9 pm. We would love to see you there!