This is one of those pieces that started with a background in search of a foreground. Backgrounds are funny things, I sometimes create one I really like, but it’s not obvious what it’s a background to, specifically. This one was like that, it sat on one of my studio easels for a few weeks just hanging out until one morning I looked at it and saw birch trees and smacked my forehead and thought, “But of course, duh.”

The trees were created by cutting out long cardboard strips, coating them with wet paint and pressing them onto the canvas, then re-pressing them with a different color paint. and so on, until I got them where I wanted them. This technique not only creates nice straight trunks (which I thought this piece needed) but has the added bonus of creating a superb mess in the studio, so it was a win-win.