Magnificent Sugar Maple Tree

My largest oil painting — six feet square, the largest canvas I could carry down six flights of stairs and take on the subway. It’s about growth and death at the same time: I painted this sugar maple while my friend Mag, ninety-two, was dying, and the painting was how I asserted some agency against all that helplessness. The canvas is stretched on Janet Fanning’s stretcher bars — a neighborhood painter who had died that year; her family passed her thirty-year-old wood on to me, and this challenge came with it. First shown at the first ArtSlope, Brooklyn, 2016.