Jennifer Peart
Signal in Gold

12 x 9 inches
Acrylic on wood panel, framed in a maple float frame
2025

“Signal in Gold” reflects the moment when the golden aspen leaves announce that the turning has begun. In Bishop Creek Canyon of the Eastern Sierra, I found a perfect little solitude sit spot to tap in and listen. The canyon holds that particular alpine hush where light feels clarified, where the air itself seems to shimmer against rock and water.

Aspen groves, specifically the quaking aspen, scientifically known as Populus tremuloides, are considered a single, massive organism. Beneath the flicker of individual leaves and their trunks lies an extensive, interconnected root system. What appears as a gathering of separate trees is in fact one being, sending up thousands of genetically identical stems from a shared underground body. The largest known colony of a single male quaking aspen lives in Fishlake National Forest in Utah. It even has a name: Pando, meaning “I spread.”

Maybe if I sit long enough beside Bishop Creek, this aspen organism will consider me a friend and reveal their name to me. Maybe.

May this piece remind us that what looks separate above ground is often unified below. That change can be luminous rather than mournful. That we, too, are rooted in networks of kinship and memory. And that the golden signal of autumn is not an ending, but a message from the living earth: we belong to one another, even when we stand alone.

View more landscape paintings by Jennifer Peart