don't mow the grass; don't burn the weeds; don't prune the trees
oil and colored pencil on panel, 11 × 15 inches, 2023

Painted on a handmade panel (poplar cradle; baltic birch surface) with stretched muslin and chalk gesso grounds.

This comes from walking my dog at night. I love looking into an un-built lot and seeing everything that springs up when the ground is left unattended. The space isn’t vacant; it’s teeming.

There is a moment in Andrei Tarkovsky’s movie The Sacrifice (1986) when Alexander tells the story of two weeks laboring tirelessly to fix up his ailing mother’s overgrown garden. He “wanted to mow the grass; burn the weeds; prune the trees,” to “redo the garden in [his] own taste, with [his] own hands.”

After forcing the space into orderly submission, he takes a bath and prepares himself to enjoy the view, even putting on a tie. When he sits in his mother’s chair to look out the window at the garden as if through her eyes, he is horrified. Instead of beauty, he sees violence. He has pruned all the beauty out of his mother’s garden. There is no longer nature, just the semblance of it.

Control is so tempting, but surrender is more beautiful.

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