Forest of Fire

Three things were in mind when approaching this painting:
1. The implementation of depth in recent work. I'm drawn to creating an exaggerated feeling of depth. A friend was looking at some of my paintings and asked, "What if you toy with that expectation?" In this painting it is almost as if the trees are placed arbitrarily in front of the scene. Is it a composite? are the trees growing in water? or are they lining the bank of the body of water?

2. Around the same time, I had a painting survive a fire. Another friend was looking at that painting (a red overgrown car), and said "Wow it's like the trees in your painting were in a forest fire and didn't get burned! They are survivors!" I thought this was a nice metaphor. The fire is in the foreground, but in the distance the trees are still green.

3. In Japanese the kanji for forest is 森, which comprised of three trees. All it takes is three trees to communicate a forest. This lead me to learn that there is no universally recognized definition of a forest. More than 800 definitions are used around the world. What is a forest for you? — Our languages sort our impressions of what constitutes a community and what constitutes an individual.