“Emerald Leaves.” And here I was starting to dive into the challenge of painting trees from this perspective.
This painting was inspired by a photo I took during my trip to Italy that year–was it a public park in Venice?
The things I worked to capture, that still delight me to this day: Those vines creeping up the trunk. The little knots and notches in the tree’s bark. The sunlight and shadows playing in leaf-patterns. The way certain bunches of leaves overhead catch the sunlight and show up as a bright yellow-green flame. How the combination of sunlight and leafy plant life just fills our eyes with GREEN.
Emeralds. That chlorophyll hue that keeps life on Earth going.