Seed Pod

Field of Trees (previously titled Forest of Seeds) began with a desire to capture the moment that exemplifies the abundance of nature — if we were able to see everything all at once.

Looking through the crisscrossing branches of a sage plant, there are hundreds of stems branching again and again, carrying flowers, carrying seeds. The depth of that image feels almost infinite.

When the space is compressed and everything is included at once, the experience shifts. Instead of focusing on a single branch or form, you begin to feel the overwhelming density of life present within the plant.

The painting began by building texture across the panel — and then layering metal leaf over that texture, and then paint over textured leaf. It is the sensation of multiple depths, multiple images, existing together. As the painting developed, the image began to resemble a forest.

Later, another layer arrived — soft pastel, sitting on top of every layer that came before it. One more layer of depth added to the others, sharpening the image and bringing the forest into clearer focus. This is a continued study into the sensation of abundance and the shifting nature of our focus when confronted with so much to see at once.

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This piece began with a black gesso ground layered with acrylic paint and gold leaf. Over that, a layer of silk — a material traditionally used in some Japanese painting practices — creates an semi-translucent encaustic-like base to paint on top of.  Oil paint applied with spatula and brush sink the paint into the silk, while oil stick sits on top in thick, crusty, gestural marks. Finally, layers of gilded wool and paper are layered on top, creating actual surface texture, light-catching shine, and irregular topography.

Originally titled “The Ecosystem of the Plant” I was after was the feeling of looking  into a thick shrub like looking into infinity- the way your eyes move between focus and unfocus while looking through layers of leaves, stems, seeds, and shadow. There is a density inside a bush that can feel endless, like an entire world contained within itself.

Embedded leaves and gold leaf behind the silk, combined with layers of thick oil stick lines and marks, and textured gilded wool, built a space that feels almost infinite, as though the image continues deeper into the panel. Something (creation, our own evolution) is happening all the time, and it remains often hidden from our own eyes.

The work has also started opening toward an installation idea — what it would mean to physically enter the microclimate of a sage bush and experience its density and layered complexity from within.

Field of Seeds began with collecting. I gathered seeds with my son, crushing them into my hands and placing them into a bowl. Compost found its way into the mixture as well —thanks to him— eggshells, stems, branches, fragments of plants. All of it belonged.

The seeds, compost, plant material, and mulberry paper, were embedded directly into the panel surface, then layered with gold leaf, silver leaf, dyed silver, brass, and glass glitter. There is no paint in the work. The image emerges entirely through gilded organic matter and the subtle tonal shifts of metal leaf, texture and light built into the surface itself.

In its finished state, the piece feels ethereal.  Suggestions of a field begin to appear, and flower-like forms emerge from the density. This is literally a field of seeds, compressed into an image.

The work feels tactile and asks to be touched — seeds want to be gathered, held, scattered, and seen. The installation ideas connected to this piece are moving toward something physical and immersive: an experience involving touch, accumulation, gathering, and dispersal. An environment that invites closeness and  engagement with the earth.

Seed Pod No. 4 began with branches.

The installation ideas have been moving toward the experience of standing under a tree — watching the carpet of fallen flowers on the ground, feeling the shadows of branches shift across your feet in the sunlight. This piece is playing with those shapes and that quality of translucency.

There is a base of gold, silver, and dyed silver leaf, with a layer of very fine silk chiffon laid over it -- thin enough that the leaf shows through. Pieces of silk dyed with earth pigment were then layered on top, playing with translucency further. Where the silk doubles at the edges it darkens, reading almost like branch and twig forms. A swatch of blue silk laid over both pink and blonde silver leaf creates something that might be a flower, or a mountain developing in the distance.

The investigation is beginning to zoom out. The earlier pieces were concerned with the singularity of seeds — their scale, their texture, their abundance. This one is moving toward the interconnected ecosystem they belong to: branches, shadows, the passage of light through layers, the way you can look at a tree and never quite arrive at a single fixed thing.

This piece is still in process.
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Flower Harmonies started alongside Harmonics— soil, seed pods, and leaves covering the whole panel surface, sealed with acrylic so it could harden, then gesso, then gold and silver and mixed metal leaf over the top. Seed pods throughout. It's what the desert floor looks like right now, this season, with the Palo Verde and Ironwood having dropped everything.

Where Harmonics base layer of leave was more intentionally composed with branches, this one stayed closer to a scattered, consistent layer — the way the ground actually looks. The gilded texture came out so dense and uniform that it was hard to find space for any image to come through.

To work through that I started laying gilded pieces of paper over the surface — same gold leaf, but flat and shiny now, raising the texture flat on top of the pitted pod texture. Paper and paint are going in as well. Slowly it feels like flowers are emerging, but not a field of flowers — just amorphous floral shapes that come and go, nothing defined.

Still in process.

Harmonics began alongside its sister piece, Flower Harmonies. Each one took a different view of what a base layer of gilded leaves could become.

For Harmonics  I took leaves and branches from our jojoba plant and willow acacia tree, and pressed and dried them flat.  I gathered fallen seed pods from palo verde and jojoba and scattered them across the panel surface along with leaves, and arranged the composition a bit  — so what comes through is more the structure of branches and leaves. Paper was worked in a few places where the wood panel felt to bare. Then gold leaf and silver leaf over the top.

Five strips of green paper then torn and laid across the surface in a vertical orientation, then silk strips tinted to match. Gilded paper went down flat and shiny in some areas, while others areas of the piece stayed pitted and raised, so light catches differently. In places the silk sits so high over the ridge of a seed pod or branch there is actual space underneath it — you could put a finger under the surface.

Other pieces in this series have built density through thin layers carefully stacked and lit from within, more or less flat by comparison. Harmonics has actual relief — closer to sculpture, a first step toward something you could stand inside of.

The name comes from sound: a chord as several notes imprinted over each other, the same image turned seven ways. I wanted to create a visual experience of what is usually captured in sound—harmonics — and for the image to convey that life is volume, rhythm, silence, space, and charge -all at once. What does it look like to be regenerating?