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.