Artworks > Tangle Tree Paintings
TANGLE TREE PAINTING
I use a paintbrush like a dowser uses a divining rod. The compositions, colors, marks, and brushstrokes comprising my visual language start in contemporary realism and then develop into allegorical scenarios inviting multiple levels of interpretation and message. I smear, scrape, wipe, cover over, obliterate, and repaint aspects of the imagery to depict my connection to the environment around me, remembered places, and relentless change. I want to make plain how anthropomorphic trees are their intertwining branches, their sheltering canopies, their leaves and trunks that telegraph the health of our surroundings. Regarding these paintings, art critic Shana Nys Dambrot wrote in the Huffington Post, “Nature is … the raw source material of her pictures. In her studio, depiction becomes a dialog and evolves past the crisp border of ideal realism—but not so far toward abstraction or surrealism that the heroic image is undermined.”
