2021                           

During the 1990’s I had been working abstractly, but I felt the need for a definite subject. I didn’t have studio so every day I walked and drew in Riverside Park where I noticed the peeling bark and distinct patterns on the Sycamore trees. In 1997 I continued to draw in the park while I also took Life Drawing classes at the Art Students League. One day my vision changed. I noticed that the limbs and tree trunks resembled human limbs and anatomical features. After that time my art became focused on the human presence I perceived in certain trees. This required a leap of belief and imagination, but I found my discovery was anchored in stories of Transformation from Roman poet Ovid’s “The Metamorphoses.” In my hybrid paintings I employ traditional techniques to give my art convincing authority which makes it believable without becoming academic. I produce semi-abstract amalgams that are suffused with feelings of revelation and regeneration. My husband is a mathematician and we began to travel to conferences to places like Italy, Russia, England and China where I found some exciting human-like trees for my World Tree Series.

We all know that trees are a crucial link that is essential for the sustainability of our planet. Trees absorb carbon dioxide and emit the oxygen that we breathe. Trees hibernate in winter and in spring they are reborn, offering signs of resurrection and hope. They rejuvenate us and refresh our minds by illuminating and expanding our imaginations.

Due to the global civilization, humans bring goods from one part of the world to another, spreading new harmful infections, invasive species of insects and tree diseases. The climate change is amplifying these effects and putting forests under additional stresses to which they cannot adjust quickly enough.

Whether we like it or not, wilderness worldwide is slowly but surely being transformed into a human-managed park. But the tendency of people to help and take care of those with whom they empathize is well documented. I think the awareness, that trees are complex entities connected to us by structural similarities would go far to create empathy and increase the likelihood for their survival in the human-dominated world. I hope my art makes a small contribution in this direction by stressing the organic roots of all living systems and our primal connection to the nature we have left behind in our high-tech world.