Rivers Feed the Trees

Artist's Statement from Meredith Nemirov

I have lived near many rivers. 
I have painted by and walked along them; 
the Hudson on the west side of Manhattan,
the East River, which I recently learned is not a river, but an estuary.
The Rio del Ebro in La Rioja, Spain.
The Uncompahgre and San Miguel Rivers in Southwest Colorado 
where I have lived for the past 35 years.

While painting all the rivers and their tributaries I am picturing trees, 
their trunks branching out to limbs and finally twigs, 
the same occurring in our own bodies, 
the main arteries becoming smaller and smaller veins. 

Along with visualizing these similarities recurring in nature, 
and our own bodies as part of the natural world, 
I sit by a flowing river and think of its journey,
from source to mouth like our lives, from birth to death. 
With all of its meanderings, variations of tempo
and the way it changes the land through which it flows. 

I enjoy painting all of these rivers into the two-dimensional abstraction of a map,
following their paths as they flow through canyons, 
becoming arroyos, streams and creeks, as they make their way to the estuary 
and finally out to sea.
It is a collaboration with the cartographers who also walked along 
these same rivers, over 100 years ago.

‘I’ve known rivers: 
I’ve known rivers ancient as the world and older than the flow of human
blood in human veins
My soul has grown deep like the rivers.’

Langston Hughes