Boyoma la Belle

There is no forest portrayed here, but there should be. The hills don't exist, they are a few strokes of the brush. Reality has no fields that are not in a small clearing in the forest invisible to any road.
Yet, for all that, this represents in my head the road to that part of Kisangani in the Congo where I lived.

 

Painted ten years after I left -- a sketch in paint -- the trees urban, the rest imagination. Is that allowed?

Under the August sun

Another set of stairs, without the slim comfort of shade, under a relentless sun, are also laborious to climb. Looking up, the lone tree at the top appears as a fragmented object.

Eyes, blinded by the light, see the tree and its branches shattered.

Urban Trees I Have Known

Sunlight flickers on a stone walkway lined with old trees. Walking up the staircase in the intense heat of the summer months in Haifa, a port city on Mt. Carmel, is oppressive. Even the shade of the tree-lined steps can't diminish the heat by much. 

Envisioning that intensity.

Blue Spruce

Native to the American West, this spruce is an ornamental tree, decorous on urban lawns.

It is a tree of humility -- especially when it curves or grows bent under piles of winter snow. It bows its head as it grows old, knowing perhaps that it will be replaced before it gets too large.