richard  garrison

The Bengali poet, Rabindranath Tagore, in one of his Fireflies, said "trees are earth's endless effort to speak to the listening heaven." I think this is a poetic way to say that all life is connected, and evidence of an underlying Spirit.

After photographing and studying tree structures for a decade, I have recently begun to work totally from memory, resulting in more abstracted images.

In addition to exploring the visual qualities of color, line, shape, and of paint, I seek to capture some of the aforementioned beauty and spirit in these paintings, and in so doing, to express my feelings about the need for us to preserve nature, to live in harmony with it, so as to ensure our own preservation. To do this we must simply protect it from ourselves.