Witnesses

“The icons I return to again and again, apart from the human torso, are the vessel and the tree trunk – the long-lived tree – a witness to human events.”

“I first became aware of looking at a tree the way an artist might study her subject, sitting for a portrait, wanting to penetrate to the core of her essence. I would look at the trees behind the house, struggling to find ways of transforming the wet paint into the fullness, the density, the rondeur of the trunk, a volumetric illusion – the light on its surface neutralized to its essential, unnamable color. To paint a tree without copying Nature, without description, without making a picture of a tree. That was my goal.”