This is one of the first paintings I did in the Ogham Tree Alphabet series. My motivation in creating this series was to connect my Irish ancestry with my current life, born, raised and living in North America. I found twenty trees connected to this old alphabet. The letters were made of straight lines crossing a vertical line, carved into stones. It was taught using the trees and their qualities, and when they budded leafed out and bloomed, or set fruit, during the year. There are qualities assigned to each tree, some of which are duplicated in the alphabet.
I decided to portray equivalent North American trees, from Canada, the USA and Mexico, and later I added birds commonly associated with those particular trees, and I started to write in the words I found in sites devoted to the alphabet. Some are very decorative, others more plain, though there is a thread of style woven through them. The paintings are done on canvas or wood panels, using acrylic paint and paper collage.
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