Red Butte Garden’s visitor center provides an ideal setting for Susan Makov’s ode to trees. Image by Shawn Rossiter.

Red Butte Garden and Arboretum is a dreamy venue for an exhibition, practically perfect in every way for Susan Makov’s dazzling 31-piece Tree Language, up through Aug. 26. The July opening was crowded and buzzing so the artist will give a talk and answer queries about her haunting (and rather mysterious) work on Saturday, Aug. 17, from 1 to 3 p.m.

Makov tells us, in poetic fashion, that “the trees speak in an unknown language. A mountain trail filled with fir and pine. The understory is filled with branches, long past their prime. Calligraphic lines, the branches broken, bent in time and weather. The density of the ‘lines’ speaks in paragraphs about their history in the fierce weather’s winds of many winters. Oblivious to world events, speaking about their rooted growth, they are unable to move from the spot. Also visible are remnants from people who pass through the forest and through the world.”

Whew! While many of the works are intricate with abstract roots (so to speak) and the temptation is to get up close to examine them, these richly-hued paintings are best seen from a distance, a luxury the roomy Visitor Center at the top of Wakara Way at the University of Utah makes possible. Makov’s trees blend nicely with those in the Garden, several visible just outside the enormous windows. (While there is no admission charge to attend the talk or to view the painted trees on canvas, there is a fee to hike the trails and see the live trees and flower displays in the state arboretum. Tell the attendant at the desk why you are visiting.)

A New Yorker by birth, Makov came to Utah in 1977 to teach art at Weber State University. She has lived in Salt Lake City for more than 30 years and is the owner of Green Cat Press. Her upbringing in a home where plein air painting was a daily practice significantly shaped her artistic vision. As she describes, it was “a mirror of my inner world and the fragmented landscape that was becoming the territory we inhabit in our daily lives.” This blend of reality and dreamscapes is evident in her paintings, which offer a window into a rich inner landscape filled with textures from the natural world, underpinned by abstract narratives rooted in myths and legends.

“Traditionally,” Makov observes, “the forest has come to represent a place of being lost, exploration, and mystery. Having worked with authors such as Diane Ackerman, Wendell Berry and Ray Bradbury, the content of their work inspired me to address both ecosystems and fantasy within my own work.”

Traveling and hiking in the west initiated her work about landscape and nature. “Beginning with many photographs about the land, painting is [now] my sole focus,” Makov says. “My work in oil on canvas began with a monthlong stay in Seattle followed by an autumn hike in the Uinta Mountains. In my observation of trees in the forests, both coastal and intermountain, deciduous leaves were dropping during a coastal drought while the mountain evergreens were becoming skeletal, losing needles to fire and pine bark beetles. At the time, the structures of trees appeared to resemble a type of ‘forest calligraphy.’ Beautiful in their visual appearance, yet pointing to the devastation from natural events in the wilderness.

“Messages” in the forests are from the past and present and remind me of what will be missed as I see changes in the natural world,” Makov continues. “You can feel a sense of magical mirrors of an alternate reality. Closely observe the details as though you are seeing the forest for the first time,” she urges.

Though dominated by abstract depictions of trees, Makov’s exhibit is punctuated with scenes from southern Utah’s mostly treeless landscape. Image by Shawn Rossiter.

Susan Makov: Tree Language, Red Butte Gardens, Salt Lake City, through Aug. 26

Ann Poore

A graduate of the University of Utah, Ann Poore is a freelance writer and editor who spent most of her career at The Salt Lake Tribune. She was the 2018 recipient of the Salt Lake City Mayor’s Artist Award in the Literary Arts.