Sue Perry - Paintings

This is a second attempt to portray a pair of maples growing (for now at least) on 19th Ave in Seattle’s Central District. The first (Power Struggle, 2014) used a tunnel-like one point perspective to include City Light poles, trees reduced to wooden verticals recruited from our forests to support the energy needed to keep humans comfortable and informed. Implicitly, these de-nuded trees witness the impact of harvesting timber to meet human needs. By their side, living maples display the development of trees recruited to satisfy our taste for shade and décor and contorted as a result of conditions determined by human convenience. Their ability to survive in competition with both their defunct cousins and our demands for energy produced the remarkable shapes the painter studied as “plastic values.”