Trees of Life II

The oil paintings, Trees of Life #2, originated in drawings sketched outdoors during the Chicago winter. Trees without leaves are reduced to forms, lines and patterns. This reduction to a simplified image or pattern of branches is meant to suggest neuron paths and veins in a human body. The similarity of the human nervous system to tree branches can be interpreted as nature’s way of suggesting that humans are meant to coincide with and not dominate nature. We are, after all, fundamentally created from the same pattern and thus related in the network of nature.

As an environmentally friendly artist, Jyl Bonaguro’s paintings are stretched on archival belgian linen, mounted on wood and the oil paint is carefully made by hand in small batches from ground pigment powders and linseed oil.