Sage Brush

2025

Somewhere in the high desert scrub of Colorado, a chamisa or rabbit brush pushes its roots through dry soil and sends its arms wide and unhurried toward an apricot sky. Laurie Waalkes has been watching plants like this her whole life — the ones most people walk past without a second glance — and she has always known they had something to say. In this piece, she gives them the stage they deserve, painting the tree in confident ink and sage acrylic over a ground layered with fragments of old maps, vintage sheet music, and the printed words: 'Whatever you can dream you can, begin it. Boldness has genius, power, and magic in it. Begin it now.' Those words — Goethe's, long attributed — read like a personal manifesto here. Laurie arrived at her full-time art career after thirty years in Colorado classrooms, and there is something quietly triumphant about a tree this rooted, this reaching, rising above an invitation to begin. A small quail stands nearby. A sunflower blooms at the base. A map fragment names Mexico, suggesting distance traveled, borders crossed, a world wider than any one place. The result is what Laurie calls a treasure hunt — a piece that gives something different to every viewer who leans in. Some will find the music. Some will read the quote and feel it land. Some will simply stand inside the warmth of that apricot and blue and feel, inexplicably, like they have come home.