"What keeps my heart awake is colorful silence." ~ Claude Monet

In My heart, something truly beautiful awakens within as quaking aspens, on the verge of their budding leaves opening, blush with anticipation in colorful silence.

In the very short period of time when the white-barked tree is aglow in the shiny dark brown-reddish buds that are on the verge of opening, the bark almost appears to blush away from it's stark white. But just for the relatively fleeting moments of mere hours or a day, and as the buds open with the fresh green quaking glory within, the blush of the aspen's bark abates back to white.

The piece is in tribute to Claude Monet, the original master of landscape light, who understood first and best. Most of Monet's trees were soft-edged, scrubbed shapes of blues, violets and warm grays. He cared much less about the detail of the leaves and twigs, suggesting all that fussy detail with few strokes of the brush - and much more about observing and painting the surrounding atmosphere enveloping the trees...he wasn't really painting a tree, he was painting a moment in life.

To catch this layered transition of hours and days all in one image on the Grand Canyon North Rim, has given me yet a new color of appreciation about one of my most favorite trees.

I hope you enjoy this as much as I feel it.