ARTIST KRISTIN LEACHMAN is exploring the human world’s relationship with trees, and by extension, with all of nature. Her current project, Fifty Forests, looks at the “self-organizing patterns in trees” with intimate paintings of the formations and structures of their bark. She began in 2010 in her adopted home state of California and plans to travel to forested and deforested sites on protected and unprotected lands in all 50 states.

“By transcribing the unspoken language of the structural integrity and biological resilience of trees, my paintings explore the intersection of painting and the natural world, as well as themes of representation and abstraction,” writes Leachman. They are “meant as a contribution to the urgent conversation around our changing climate.”

New works depicting an old-growth longleaf pine forest in southwest Georgia will be presented in Kristin Leachman: Longleaf Lines at the Georgia Museum of Art in Athens, Ga., from July 23, 2022 to Feb. 5, 2023.