Description:

Speltz's visits to the Sungei Buloh Wetland Preserve in Singapore and to the Hoh Rain Forest in Olympic National Park, WA, inspired these 5 canvases. The works suggest processes of growth, dissolution and regeneration, offering an opportunity to pause and reflect on Nature’s ceaseless cycle of life, death and rebirth. 

Among her paintings, Speltz depicts a colonnade of trees that germinated and took root in nurse logs, created when a forest tree falls, decays and provides a strata where seeds can germinate. After a nurse log has disintegrated, it will have nurtured the mature trees that grow along the path where it fell. The roots in Speltz's paintings represent a point of entry into a chthonic world that is both literal and mythic.

Prior to focusing on the visual language of painting, Speltz has a lifetime immersion in the language of books and verbal communication. She studies painting at the Palette and Chisel Academy of Fine Arts and lives in Chicago, IL.