Tree Children
The forest I could reach, and the life I could not.
Tree Children was born in the narrow threshold where as a child I stood at the edge of the woods and imagined a life just beyond reach. In those young years, the forest was not simply a place of trees, but a boundary line between what I was enduring and a quiet invitation to take a breath and run.
The small rituals of searching for lady slipper flowers and tracing shapes along the ledges of mushrooms were not idle play, but acts of subconscious orientation, a way of touching something organic in a life that was otherwise brutally controlled. In those moments, my body remained tethered to a reality defined by confinement, labor, and psychological rupture, creating a split where presence and absence coexisted in uneasy silences.
The figures within this piece represent this division, emerging and dissolving among the vertical lines of the trees like memory itself, fragmented, repeated, and partially obscured. The forest becomes both refuge and a wall of distortion, its beauty filtered through a mind terrified of what lay beyond them.
Color moves with a kind of dissonant harmony, blues and yellows pressing against one another, in both vitality and disorientation, as though the natural world was trying to reach me even as I continued to retreat inward. What remains is not a simple recollection, but an imprint of perception shaped by that dissociation, where the desire to run freely lives alongside the inability to fully inhabit that freedom.
Tree Children does not resolve this tension, but it does hold it. It allows you to witness the simultaneous existence of innocence in its rupture, and curiosity contained, without forcing them into a single narrative.
The woods are still there, still waiting, but here they are seen through the layered lens of my childhood, carrying both the softness of imagination and the weight of what could not be escaped.
— Vennie
“Tree Children”
Bring your print to life with hundreds of different frame and mat combinations. Our framed prints are assembled, packaged, and shipped by our expert framing staff and delivered “ready to hang” with pre-attached hanging wire, mounting hooks, and nails.