Katie DeGroot's paintings pay homage to the seemingly arbitrary but constant, insistent growth of the botanic world. She considers specific trees alone and as part of their various natural groupings. Her meticulous, detailed watercolors portray each tree as an individual - with its specific structure, stance, and decoration of fungi. She also captures how each tree reacts to the other, equally observed characters in the group.
As DeGroot puts it, "When we think of a tree, we usually conjure up an image of a perfectly pruned tree, balanced and symmetrical. In nature, those rarely exist. Trees are individuals. Trees grow to survive, adapting to their given environment, growing into strange shapes, producing oddly shaped limbs, becoming contortionists to get to sunlight, and bowing to the will of other larger neighboring trees.
They grow in context to each other and in relationships with their neighbors, adapting as best they can to the situations they find themselves in. In many ways they are similar to us, part of a larger community, whose varied geography and specific environments challenge and form us as individuals."
