A series of acrylic paintings created to celebrate the big trees in California. Click on each image for more information and details on that painting.
Each painting is based off of an iPhone 6 photo taken while visiting a forest park somewhere in California. Each image is meant to celebrate the individual trees featured. The painting itself is undertaken as an act of reverence for the subject, and a translation of the artists subjective emotional experience beneath the trees.
I want to start making larger and more immersive paintings in this series. Miniaturizing the giant trees was a particular challenge, as the scale of the trees is their grandest aspect. But why should the tree’s scale be accurate? I want to use the scale for emotional effect instead. The act of visiting the trees and then making the paintings, in the first place, is a way for me to grasp at control over the deeply endangered and imperiled trees that I hold so dear. They appear entirely immovable- and are very much immovable for a single person- but the trees are still extraordinarily fragile in my mind, as the CZU complex fire in 2020 is a fresh memory. This single wildfire incident destroyed much of the poorly managed, fuel loaded Big Basin park, transforming it forever, killing irreplaceable old growth trees.
Shrinking the still-living trees via photography, and then re-scaling the images to be paintings you can hold in your hands: this has the effect of turning the trees into nostalgic, jewel-like objects that resist change. But larger canvases could allow for human-scale landscapes to emerge from the paintings. If I can maintain the intense level of detail and fanciful scale, I think I could make a big painting or series of paintings that can continue to pull viewers into the world of the redwoods in a very hypnotizing way. So, this series is still ongoing.