Plein air oil paintings created under the canopy of the oak groves in New Orleans
This collection is a meditation on the landscape I now call home. The thick, overgrown landscape, humming with frogs and insects. This is my ode to her and attempt to grow closer to her. I think I will always feel like a foreigner, coming from the Mid-Atlantic, despite giving birth to two children here. When I am lost I look to the woods, to the trees, who always make me feel at home. So when I started painting again I started with my old friends – the oak trees.
Mary Oliver puts it best:
When I am among the trees, especially the willows and the honey locust, equally the beech, the oaks and the pines, they give off such hints of gladness. I would almost say that they save me, and daily. I am so distant from the hope of myself, in which I have goodness, and discernment, and never hurry through the world but walk slowly, and bow often. Around me the trees stir in their leaves and call out, “Stay awhile.” The light flows from their branches. And they call again, “It’s simple,” they say, “and you too have come into the world to do this, to go easy, to be filled with light, and to shine. - Mary Oliver
Resurrection Ferns climbing tree limbs,
Spanish Moss draped and blowing in the breeze
of silver mornings that dissolve into blue
with light spilling through the canopy
