Weather dominates landscape in the most seductive manner. It is nature at its most abstract - most violent, most serene, most mysterious, most prosaic - and it mirrors the changing emotional landscape within me. My painting practice is to work with watery pigments, I pour sweep, brush, drip, and fling layers of paint like clouds scudding across the sky. I coax pools of paint into translucent veils of color. Anchoring these ephemeral elements are gestural tree limbs, horizontal water marks, stripes and blocks of color.

I was in a very difficult painting place the entire year of 2001. NOTHING was working. As an abstract painter, I couldn't bring myself to paint something as specific as a tree, although I had been photographing them for ten years as reference material.

Two years ago, I had taken a photo of a tree trunk with a radically twisting limb that had survived the fierce winds from the Hudson River in lower Manhattan. Behind this tree, arose the Twin Towers. I felt annoyed by their presence, since I wanted an uncluttered image of the tree. I shot the picture and forgot about it.

Two months after 9/11, still numb from witnessing the event just five blocks from my home, I tried to paint again. Not knowing how to begin, I projected slides on a half-finished painting. Suddenly the World Trade Center and that intrepid tree appeared. Overwhelmed with grief and shame that I had been annoyed by the towers, I decided to complete the painting by showing the tree still standing. In place of the World Trade Center was a smear of red-orange paint. After finishing this work, images for new paintings suddenly poured out of me and a painting block that I had been grappling with for most of the year was gone.

The fragility of a moment was really brought home to me that day. I have talked about that concept in my artist statement for years, and follow a daily meditation practice of mindfulness to each moment. Yet, a searing event such as 9/11 brings new meaning. We think something so huge, so substantial, so solid, like the World Trade Centers will be there in the landscape forever. In the city, when I photograph delicate clouds, and the trees standing in front of them, the urban landscape is ever present. The buildings’ edges, unbending, precise lines, make nature seem so vulnerable. Yet that tree still stands after the towers fell. Everything, every moment is vulnerable.