Three figures rise from the trunk of a single tree, so completely joined to it that you cannot say where the bodies end and the wood begins. At seventy-two by ninety inches, The Divine Trinity Tree is less a picture you look at than a place you step into: a meditation on love, identity and the ties that make us who we are.
At the center stands a man, eyes closed, head gently bowed, held between two women. One turns inward toward him in intimacy; the other looks outward and meets your gaze, drawing you into the circle. Their drapery and long hair pour downward into the trunk and spread across the ground like roots. Quietly woven through the scene is the Greek myth of Adonis, the mortal born from a tree and cherished by both Aphrodite and Persephone: held between love and beauty on one side, and depth and transformation on the other. Here, masculine and feminine are not opposing forces but interdependent ones, each holding the others up.
Look closer and a small, tender gesture appears: one woman gently holds the other's hair. It reads as a thread running through time, linking past, present and future, and binding three separate lives into one living form.
The tree itself carries the painting's meaning. Its trunk is the body, grounded and present. Its canopy is everything we cannot touch: thought, emotion, the energy of being alive. Above the figures, the branches open into a vast field of gold, ochre, blush and cream, flecked with umber and deepening to indigo at the upper edges. Gold shimmer and sparkle are worked through the canopy, so the light moves across it as you move across the room. This is where the divine lives in the painting: not somewhere far away, but within life itself.
Among the roots, almost hidden, sits a small arched door. It is easy to miss and impossible to forget once found, a threshold between the outer world and the inner self, and an invitation to look again.
Few paintings reward both distance and nearness so generously. From across a room, The Divine Trinity Tree is a single glowing gesture of figures and gold. Up close, it becomes intimate: the softness of charcoal skin, the flick of paint through the canopy, the door waiting at the base. It is a reminder that none of us stands alone, and that we are not singular, but layered.