Tree Of Birds

2020

You feel it before you see them—the weight of witness. Then the faces begin to surface, one after another, from what first seemed mere texture. An elderly woman tilts her head as if hearing music you cannot. A child's eyes meet yours with knowing that belongs to centuries. This is the painting of a crowd that never dispersed, a gathering that continues in pigment what was interrupted in life. The artist has given us a meditation on what it means to be among—among the living, the dead, the remembered, the forgotten. Each figure exists in relationship: leaning toward another, turning away, rising or sinking in the visual field like bodies in water. The palette speaks of flesh at all its stages—the flush of life, the pallor of exhaustion, the gray-violet of things that persist beyond their time. Vertical lines descend like barriers or perhaps like light breaking through cathedral space. The right edge hints at architectural form—a fragment of fan vault, a suggestion of shelter that cannot contain what presses against its boundaries. This is not chaos but community, terrible and tender in equal measure. The painting asks: who do we carry with us, and how long before we become the carried?

Type

Original

Framing

Unframed