The subject matter came from one of my many walks in Prospect Park in Brooklyn. There’s a
sycamore grove at the bottom of the park. Sometimes the trees are quite mottled and
striking, depending on how the bark flakes off, but this winter they were a dull and
homogenous green. This is caught the light in late afternoon, and I wanted to bring attention
to massive scale of their trunks overlapping one another. I was reading The Captive by Marcel
Proust at the time, and I thought about these trees place very intentionally into the park, in a
grove: how the trees started to resemble the characters in the book, very intentionally placed
and unmovable members of French high society. It took me a long time to arrive at the ground
color, so the paint is built up quite significantly on the ground and by the path through the
grove. The most striking colors, orange and purple, set the stage for the painting, and the rest
are colors in between purple and orange.