Join us virtually for Deb Komitor's exhibit, "Window's on the Woods."

"Trees are one of Deb Komitor’s true loves.

Her affairs are numerous, long, and lush. She sounds dreamy as she remembers the redwoods in California’s Jedediah State Park, where she made her husband stop the car in the middle of the road so she could get out and gaze up at the canopy of tree limbs and trunks stretching overhead. The poignant moment brought her to tears.

‘It felt like I’d found my ancestors, these big amazing trees that have been here so long.’ says the longtime Colorado Springs artist. ‘It felt like going home. We’re just a blip in their lives.’

And then there was the rain-forest in Washington’s Olympic National Forest, and the cottonwood trees along Shooks Run Trail near her downtown home. There’s also the gnarly, twisting locust tree and the century-old maple tree in her own yard — it was a deciding factor in buying the home. But when it came time to trim the stately creature, she had to vamoose.

‘I couldn’t be here when they cut the limbs because I could feel it.’ she says.

The same went for a pair of old elm trees outside her former art studio, which were all cut down: ‘I cried and couldn’t stand being in the studio after that.’

What does an artist do with all those emotions but pour them back into her work? She paints what she’s loved since childhood — tall trees, fallen trees, the creeks and trails that wind through and around them, and sometimes the creatures of the forest. Komitor’s oil paintings are large, though she also does small colored pencil drawings. Her paintings are created over a black gesso background, which peeks through her short brush strokes. It makes the paintings more somber, she says, but also shows a reverence for nature.

Komitor paints in an unusual way (‘I call it my dyslexic way of painting.’ she says), starting from the foreground and moving into the background. The sky is last, which isn’t the typical way of doing things. It certainly wasn’t the way the Ohio-born artist was taught at Columbus College of Art and Design, where she earned a bachelor’s degree in painting, or Colorado State University, where she earned a master’s in painting.”

– from an article by Jennifer Mulson in the Gazette

My paintings create windows to a natural world. They don’t show the fast paced, chaotic world we live in; they show the nature we are surrounded by; the world that was here long before us and, hopefully, will be here long after us. My vision is to awaken in people the awe and wonder in nature and the healing powers of a walk in the woods.

I create large scale paintings to place the viewer inside the experience. You feel the energy of the subject through each brush stroke. The paintings don’t just draw you in; they come out and get you. They engage you to enter and experience the strength, peace, hope, joy, and calmness of nature. Along with these large paintings are a series of small intimate colored pencil drawings of the animal spirits in the woods.

For the time being many parks are closed or limited l bring these works to you so that you can hike into the images and feel Mother Nature’s embrace. Now more than ever the healing power of nature is needed in our lives. Even if it is a single tree outside your window or a painting of one.

A percentage of all sales will go to Palmer Land Trust; a local non-profit, whose mission is to protect Southern Colorado’s lands for present and future generations.

Now more than ever we need art. We need to express it, we need to share it, we need to experience it, whether live or viral.