This artwork grew out of my interest in a stack of tree branches that I pruned from our bountiful fig tree that was killed by a hard freeze recently. Initially, I admired the formal beauty of the stacked and layered arched limbs, but they reminded me of all the effort that tree gave to overwhelm us with an incredible harvest of figs the summer before the freeze. My husband used (what he could remember) of his grandmother’s fig preserve recipe to preserve the figs. I threaded the tree limbs through a box that was once a drawer and used the other drawer (both from a kitchen remodel) to hold 30 jars of Lee’s figs. The bounty stacked below the barren branches made me think about our collective expectation of what undeveloped land can yield. Over the past couple of years, I have been painting small 5x5” depictions of cropped paintings by 19th women landscape painters. I’d print them out and crop them and paint the new composition. The browns in the painting by Jane Stuart (1812-1888) in Coach Fording a Stream looked so lovely with the wet tree limbs. I felt that it conveyed the idea of exploration and promise.
