
Many years ago when I had an entire group of paintings that I could not resolve I found myself in despair and went out in the rain and stood with the trees around my house and begged the universe to guide me toward finding a way to complete the entire body of work I’d been struggling with for months.
The next day I went into the studio and without even a thought I started changing all of my paintings into trees.
Since then making these abstract tree paintings has been a part of my practice which I return to every few years. I don’t know why, but sometimes they just call to me. It’s been quite some time since I started a new one. Usually I pull out a piece that’s already been “finished,” (often several times,) and just re engage with it. In that way many of these paintings wind up with well over 100 layers, and the motif of the trees, their texture and history, uniquely lends itself to this approach. The further I push these paintings the more alive they become, such that I don’t see them as paintings OF trees, I see them as paintings that ARE trees.