“In the depth of winter, I finally learned that within me there lay an invincible summer.” — Albert Camus
Red Fragments in a Quiet Field, Fort Ord, CA, 2012
There is a tree at Fort Ord that has been waiting for me.
Not in the way trees usually wait, with patient indifference and botanical dignity. This one stands like an aging ballerina who once commanded a stage and still remembers the applause. Even stripped of most of her leaves, she carries herself with theatrical resolve.
When I first saw her, she appeared suspended between seasons. The branches were mostly bare, thin veins scribbling across a pale sky, yet small eruptions of red clung to her edges like secrets she was unwilling to surrender. Around her feet, the earth hummed in soft greens and muted golds, as though the landscape itself were whispering, “Stay. Not yet.”
I have always been drawn to these in-between states. Not winter, not spring. Not absence, not abundance. A breath held longer than comfort allows.
In truth, I recognized myself in her silhouette.
There are periods in my life when I feel completely leafless. Ideas fall away. Certainties evaporate. I stand in open fields of doubt, wondering if I have already said everything I know how to say. Creation, for me, is not optional. It is oxygen. And when it recedes, I feel the thinness immediately.
This tree, though, was not empty. She was selective.
The small red blossoms scattered through her branches did not dominate the composition. They were almost defiant in their restraint. A collector once told me that scarcity creates desire. Nature seems to understand this better than any market strategy. Those fragments of color pulled the eye, then the heart. They were punctuation marks in an otherwise quiet sentence.
As I shaped the image later, allowing textures to settle over the scene like memory settling over childhood, the tree began to feel less like a specimen and more like a character. The background softened into something painterly, almost submerged, as if time itself had washed across the landscape. The earth was no longer literal ground. It became a recollection. A field of remembered afternoons. A place where music might drift through tall grasses without a visible source.
I often hear Debussy in moments like this. Not the notes themselves, but the atmosphere of them. A hovering. A suggestion rather than a declaration. The tree seemed suited to that kind of music. Sparse. Intentional. Elegant in her restraint.
She is not performing for us. She is surviving beautifully.
There is humor in that, too. We, humans, obsess over reinvention. New year, new project, new identity. The tree does none of this. She simply remains. She sheds. She keeps what matters. She waits for her own timing.
Fort Ord, with its layered history of presence and absence, lends itself naturally to this quiet drama. The land remembers things we no longer speak of. Perhaps that is why the air there always feels slightly haunted, but gently so. Not frightening. Just aware.
In this image, the composition allows space to breathe around the tree. She does not dominate the frame. She converses with it. The emptiness is not empty at all. It is tension. It is a possibility. It is the moment before the next movement begins.
Collectors often ask me what a piece is “about.” I rarely give a straight answer. I prefer invitations to instructions. But if I were to confess something quietly, I would say this work is about renewal without spectacle. About dignity in partial bloom. About understanding that transformation does not always arrive as fireworks. Sometimes it arrives as three red blossoms holding their ground in a field of pale green.
The tree at Fort Ord is not dramatic.
She is persistent.
And in that persistence, she becomes luminous.
Artist Statement
This work explores the quiet dignity of partial renewal. Through layered atmosphere and restrained color, I invite the viewer into a liminal space where absence and presence coexist. The solitary tree becomes a metaphor for persistence, memory, and the subtle courage of becoming. I am less interested in documenting nature than in revealing its emotional resonance.