Hope

I like to walk with my camera on nature trails. One early spring, just as the grass was beginning to turn green, the brush was budding, and the forest was still transparent before it leafed out, I saw this scene through my telephoto lense.

The challenge was to create the rather ominous bare trees while retaining the sense of light falling from above. I also wanted to paint the sense of greening in the forest. Then, as I was painting it, I saw how it felt like hope because of the lovely colors in the clearing even though I was standing in the dark forest. So, I enhanced the colors around the white tree to the strength of fantasy. The road too needed the tire tracks to say that you do not travel this path alone or for the first time. Others have gone before you and also reached the hopeful clearing not far ahead. This painting has been important to me because no matter how dismal my life might seem, the story is not over until I reach the clearing and such a hope is real. I am just not quite there yet. But I will be. Recently, my brother Larry and his wife Carol purchased this painting because it expresses their feeling as they struggle with Carol's increasing paralysis from a neck injury.