“My Friends, The Trees” Art Exhibit

MY FRIENDS, THE TREES

• Featuring artist Madeline Dillner
• July 1 – September 2, 2025
• Art Gallery at Inasmuch Foundation Crystal Bridge Conservatory

Join us for an Artist Reception on July 10, from 5:30-6:30pm, in the Inasmuch Foundation Crystal Bridge Conservatory visitor lobby.

ARTIST STATEMENT

I started painting in 2016, after 26 years of studying and working in non-art fields. As you may guess from my loudly-colored canvases, peace and stability have never been attractive to my brain. To me, the world feels muted until the roar of a concert or a new tattoo or my first view of the Rocky Mountains lights up my brain with electric pink sparks.

I think it’s for this reason that I’ve always been drawn to trees. Like a child ping-ponging between the bright, shiny world and her parent’s steadfast leg, my eyes and brain need somewhere to rest after the lines and colors of rocks and buildings. And trees are a great place to rest. Visually, their organic fractal blob-like forms pair nicely with the flat lines and layers of the rest of the world. Emotionally, they remind me that I am young and small and maybe a little bit silly, despite what life may have me thinking.

This collection of paintings is a thank you note to my friends, the trees.

To the serviceberry that welcomed me home from the hospital as a baby – whose planting by my parents the previous day (Earth Day 1990) may have been what induced my early arrival –

To the glittering aspens and blue pines that served as a playground for my sister and I and our imaginary friends –

To the obstinate holly that guarded my college apartment, stabbed anyone who went barefoot, and cradled my rope swing as I avoided my homework and dreamed about the future –

To the nuptial Oak and Cypress in the poem my mother read to my husband and me after we said our vows –

To the massive oaks that shield my kitchen window from the setting sun and greet me when I come home from work, as they greeted my aunts, grandmother, and great-grandmother before me –

To all the trees that gave my bouncy brain respite after it bolted off to capture some shiny scenery and found itself needing a place to rest –

This one’s for you. Thanks for being there.

– Madeline

ABOUT THE ARTIST

Madeline Dillner was born in Urbana, IL, and grew up playing outside. She attended the University of Oklahoma and earned a B.S. in Environmental Sustainability in 2013. Since college, she has worked for the Oklahoma Corporation Commission in the Brownfield Program, which utilizes EPA grants to assess and remediate brownfield sites across the state of Oklahoma to get them ready for reuse that benefits the community and the environment. She lives with her husband and many pets on property in Wynnewood, OK, that has been in her family for 80 years.

Her focus on painting trees began in 2024, when she was commissioned by the nonprofit organization Allied Arts to hand-paint the same Rio Grande Cottonwood tree 1,650 times, on 8” x 8” cradled wood board, to be distributed as “Step Up” gifts to people who donate over $200 through Allied Arts’ Employee Giving Campaign, to fund public arts programs in Oklahoma. To learn more about this project, this tree (a real tree in White Sands, NM!), and how to get involved with Allied Arts, please visit www.maddoesthings.com/alliedarts.

And, if you’d like to visit any of the trees in these paintings yourself, all of Madeline’s paintings have the GPS coordinates of the reference photo on the back. They can also be found in a Google Map on her website, www.maddoesthings.com.