Cherish Your Motifs

Muddy Colors · Sep 8, 2026

I paint a lot of trees. I love their shapes and textures, they make for great compositional tools, and most importantly, they’re symbolically versatile.

Sometimes trees exist in my work for the same reasons anyone would include them. Their gesture and balance can easily aid in how the eye moves through a painting. Structurally, trees can function as scaffolding for more prominent ideas. They have their own rules of anatomy, but with the diversity of trees across the planet, there is a lot more room for play than with human anatomy. Each tree species has its own flavor and sense of place.

The…