acrylic and pastel on canvas

24” x 48”

2019

The warm colors of rock and sediment in this painting travel up through the trunks of mighty trees like veins carrying lifeblood to the body, like precipitation returning to the clouds. The warmth is met with a burst of vibrant greens and yellows that reflect the experience of consciously tilting back your head and gazing up at the canopy of trees while in the forest. Humanity fills a modest role in this teeming network of connections and life, but graciously embracing our place in it requires us to humbly look up.

When I’m in the woods, I experience what feels like every possible complexity of being alive and human. It’s joy so overwhelming that it’s almost sorrowful, as there’s no possible way for my humanness to soak up the endless divinity surrounding me. Like a familiar hug, there’s comfort and healing so powerful it almost crushes me with goodness. It’s beauty so devastatingly brilliant and intricate that it steals my breath and almost breaks my heart. It’s being reminded of my limitations and humility as a small, fragile being in a world of towering trees and life that exists and thrives without me. It’s solace in the sense that I am welcomed into the haven of the forest without deserving or earning a place there, without providing any kind of service or act besides loving it so completely.

Then it comes full circle as I am reminded that the very humanness that feels too messy and complex to be as beautiful or pure as the woods, is the very thing that allows me to belong there so fully. In my humanness, I was created to live and thrive and connect with this world, with this earth. We belong to each other, the woods and I.