Some years ago I injured my right shoulder and couldn’t raise my arm to paint, or drive, or do much of anything. I’d walk on my country road day after day, always admiring the impressive vines growing on the trees. Despite knowing that they are parasites deadly to most of their supporters, I’d always found them beautiful and powerful, while simultaneously feeling allied with the trees, worrying over them. I started shooting details with my iPhone and looking at them on my computer, then printing them and looking at them in the studio. I felt strangled by not being able to paint or otherwise create. But I discovered that if I put the prints flat on a table, I could do things to them with my arm hanging down. 

There are over 150 pieces made during the two years it took my arm to heal. Some were digitally worked before printing; all have been drawn on, painted and altered with dyes, pigments, archival pencils, dimensional outlining* and so on. 

I decided to mount these paper pieces on salvaged wood planks, with the largest pieces leaning against the wall. I started using copper nails, and was told later that hammering copper nails into trees was a traditional method of killing trees by copper poisoning.

• For sale    • Sold

• Vine 50

63 x 21” ink, raised lines on panel on single wide plank

• Vine 99

16 x 10.5” mixed media on paper