Haunting, foreboding, yet warmly embracing, the forest has captured my imagination since childhood. I grew up spending summer days knee deep in thicket, exploring the woods behind my house, and developing a love and fascination for the diverse canopy of trees—the silent dignity of the massive tree trunks and the wildly exuberant mixing of leaves, twigs and branches.
For
the past ten years, I have combined memories of the mystical forest of
my childhood with contemporary studies of trees into large-scale oil
paintings that explore the primordial fairy tale forest as a metaphor
for the loss of innocence and the desire to return to a childlike state.
This deep connection between trees and the human psyche has led me to
my most recent series, Arboreal Portraits.
As
life experience etches itself on the human body, the indentations,
knots and rings of a tree represent how it too has weathered time. Using
this metaphor, I created Arboreal Portraits, a series of
paintings of individual trees—birch, conifer and palm to name a
few—posed against atypical jewel-toned backgrounds that emphasize the
uniqueness of each tree. When viewed together, the trees appear as a
family, united by their compositional structure, yet distinctively
different from one another.