Having spent hundreds of hours as a passenger driving through Midwest landscapes, I am interested in reorganizing these scenes to tell small poems. Through reorganization and abbreviation, I discover how to understand the image, really breaking it down to its bare bones. My flat and patterned base style is heavily inspired by the look of world-building in video games, such as Animal Crossing, Super Mario, and The Sims—games that reference our real world, while snapping to the grid of the magical, digital space. This portfolio of paintings represents my exploration of human life and death using trees as characters. The trees stand alone on the canvas, confined by the edges, and forced into artificial silhouettes. Using trees, I feel more comfortable confronting questions of life and death, both naturally and violently, as it relates to human life.