Friends of Pando Local Artist in Residence

The pieces that I love the most to see are the ones that I relate to. How wonderful it is that one can see an image and understand things in their soul that can’t be enunciated with speech! I aim to create art where emotion and clarity coexist. Artist and author Suzanne Brooker said that “if every kind of landscape - from the Grand Canyon to Mount Fuji - has already been painted, then what makes a landscape interesting? The answer is you. You are the new and novel ingredient: how you see and respond to a scene, the way you translate and interpret the felt sensation of nature into a two-dimensional painted surface.” With every painting, I asked myself - what am I sharing? What aspect of Pando am I trying to communicate with my audience? What do I have to say about this particular spot and how have I, as the new and novel ingredient, changed the recipe, so to speak?
One way my work answers this question visually is through composition and framing. Rather than attempting to depict Pando in its entirety, I repeatedly chose cropped, embodied viewpoints - looking up into the canopy, standing at the edge of a path, or peering through trees toward the lake. These compositional decisions reflect how it is encountered in lived experience. I simplify forms into larger value relationships, allowing the emotional tone of a scene to emerge without sacrificing clarity. The viewer is guided through a structured experience of light, atmosphere, and space. Each painting isolates a distinct perceptual condition - light, weather, or season - creating a collection of moments that together suggest the passage of time without explicitly narrating it.
Since Pando exists on a timescale far beyond human perception, my role is not only interpretation, but selection and framing of a pre-existing system. What’s so interesting about Pando is the contrast and tension between fleeting observation and massive, slow ecological continuity. This contrast is my visual thesis. Pando has persisted for thousands of years. It has survived climate variation, ecological pressure, and natural cycles of disturbance. Throughout its lifetime, humanity has fought wars that changed the course of history, made groundbreaking discoveries, and developed technology at a once unimaginable scale. Through it all Pando has stood. Pando, the largest living organism on Earth, is a testament of undying resilience and timeless wisdom of which I am a witness.
I have had the incredible privilege of living only an hour away from Pando, and so days where I got to go experience the tree were frequent. Throughout the year, I often brought my journal, watercolors, and camera, and took a day to gather inspiration from the Tree. I’d sketch, write down things I noticed, paint plein air, but mostly I tried to collect reference material that I could later work on and paint in my studio at home. Throughout the residency, those days in Pando began to feel more and more like home. The peace and quiet was something I often needed in my busy life, and Pando became a solace I looked forward to experiencing.
My paintings capture finite moments inside something that outlives human experience. Although Pando exists as a vast interconnected organism, my paintings rarely depict it as a whole. Instead, I focus on fragments - clusters of trunks, partial views, obscured distances - mirroring the way its full scale remains largely imperceptible from within. In the series of works I have created of Pando, I take you on a walk with me through the aspens, under the canopies and among the wildflowers. My paintings are impressions of a day in Pando - not just the beautiful sights, but the calmness and serenity of the experience and the wonder and awe we feel when slowing down to notice the world around us. Impressionist Alfred Sisely once said, “Each picture shows a spot with which the artist has fallen in love.” Looking back now at my work and the year I spent with Pando, I can see the progression of a love story. Over time, what began as observation became attachment. I fell in love with the way light filters through the branches and the leaves. I fell in love with the sights and sounds of a place uninterrupted by the noise and anxieties of the world. I fell in love with the way it felt to look out between the trees over the hills and see the lake. Rather than attempts to define the organism, my paintings strive to humbly witness it - moment by moment, fragment by fragment - holding briefly what has endured for thousands of years.