Winter Tree

It begins with a photograph — Nancy's own — taken on a walk, a moment of pausing and tilting the head back to look up into the bare canopy overhead. Maybe it was a winter afternoon in Marin, the light low and golden, the sky that particular blue that only comes when the air is cool and the leaves are gone. She saw something in that upward glance: not emptiness, but fullness. A network of lines as intricate as any map, as personal as a fingerprint. Back in the studio, the photograph became a starting point and then something else entirely. Colors deepened. The branches took on weight and warmth — rust, umber, touches of gold where the light catches bark. The sky pressed back with its cool blue certainty. What emerged is a painting about looking, really looking, at what surrounds us every day but rarely receives our full gaze. There is no horizon here, no ground to stand on — only the tree and the sky and the endlessly branching story between them. Viewers often find themselves doing what Nancy did: leaning in, following a branch to its tip, discovering a new passage of light. The painting gives generously. It asks the same in return.