Five-Year Plan

This intense panorama landscape is 4 feet wide and painted all in orange and red. It is powerful in person!

After my recent painting Night Thinker, I felt driven to paint another person in “Thinker pose” sitting under a Tree of Life, silhouetted by the full moon. It’s just such a striking vision to me.

“Five-Year Plan” is both a funny and an accurate title to me.

When I finally finished the painting I thought about it for days before giving it a title, wondering what would be going through my own mind, if I were the one sitting at the foot of that wide-reaching tree, gazing out at the expanse of an otherworldly sky filled with clouds of winking stars and color.

Of course the glorious landscape spread out before me under the gigantic glowing moon would be breathtaking! But after taking in my surroundings, left in this setting with nothing but time and the still night air, my thoughts would settle.

And I would most likely start thinking about my life. Where I’ve been, and where I’m going. I’d be generating ideas, brainstorming, tossing things up in the air and forming them into the seeds of new plans.

It’s appropriate to me that the person is sitting with the Tree of Life, which branches out in all directions just like our thoughts. The Tree encompasses all things, all possibilities. The shape it forms is balanced and complete, like a plan coming into being.