Do you ever want to turn into a tree?

What's the significance of a girl turning into a tree? Is it a good thing or a bad thing? Why is it that every time she looks more human in this painting I get annoyed and every time she turns too unrecognizable I get equally frustrated?

If I am that girl - what am I gaining by this transformation? Is it oneness with nature, complete solitude from humankind, true expression? Why is it so scary? Is it because I'm losing myself: my softness, my uniqueness? I'm losing my limbs, my curviness, the features that make me - me. I have body sensations as a hand turns into a branch; it wants to unstick itself from this hardened mess. It feels as if I'm losing a battle to crazy glue... But then I'm gaining perpetuity, aren't I? No. Trees are as prone to dying, getting sick, suffering from cold and heat as we are, if not more.

So I'm sitting here marking pluses and minuses and figuring out which outweighs the other. But the main issue is that I'm still drawn to this idea, in love with this idea of a human turning into a tree. I even made a larger than life painting of Daphne in college that was stolen from the studio. What is there that keeps my attention? Perhaps this struggle I'm going through is actually my living through this transformation? In order to gain immortality of sorts you become hard-skinned, you lose bits of your genuine self. You don't know where to strike the balance.

I'd like to watch my kids quietly, yet be ready to step in at a moment's notice, not be paralyzed like a tree. This paralysis is really a paralysis of thought. I get stuck in this idea of fame, recognition, money making that I lose my genuine, original self. My limbs go one by one. Hands are so stuck in tree puss that they can no longer perform.

No, I want to be Daphne who hides in a shape of a tree, but not forever. She uses it as a temporary asylum but she's able to quietly come out of that masked existence and return to humanity. She should be able to do that. Trees are people that lost their way...

Embrace all your different realities!

You start painting an object and move it into an abstract composition of shapes. It seems to lack depth so you add light and shade, you construct believable grooves and folds. Then this something starts to look like another recognizable subject. You run with it and add more elements that will turn it into a fish, or a person, or a hilltop. Once you're past this layer, all you see is that central shape of a physical being and it annoys you tremendously that this is no longer just an abstract painting that is free to be anything. Does our eye always seek something recognizable to hold onto? Do I as a painter and in my real life need to steady myself with reality?

You turn the piece upside down and tell yourself that you'll start from scratch. You can simply see lines and shapes and colors, without needing to go anywhere else. Yet, within ten seconds your eye begins to search out recognizable imagery - formal elements of a painting aren't enough for it to chew on.

Perhaps it's the nature of shapes and lines to be suggestive. With one stroke Japanese calligraphers evoke a mountain top because they know our eyes will complete the scene on their own. So why should I try to run away from suggestive imagery? Why not embrace as many realities as come to mind? When the landscape is full of incomplete spaces, our eyes are able to take it in and add to it in just the same way they see things in an abstract shape. It's about doing more with less. Wouldn't that be a nice life motto?