A Maui Beauty

28" x 22" Acrylic on canvas, 2023

Abstract

In the Summer of 2023, I had the opportunity to visit Maui and view the local rainforest on the road to Hana. In this rainforest, you drive through many twists and turns for hours with zero cellular reception. It is all you and the green. The Maui rainforest has many different types of flowers, plants, waterfalls, and trees. When I first laid eyes on some of their rainbow Eucalyptus trees, I fell in love with them and wanted to paint it so bad!

A few months went by and I still had no time to start this piece, but still wrote it down and constantly had painting these ginormous beauties in the back of my mind. Through an introduction to painting class, I was in during the Fall, I was finally given the opportunity to paint a landscape, and immediately went to Rainbow Eucalyptus trees! I also planned to include other beauties found in the Maui rainforest, such as waterfalls, lobster claw heliconia, and monstera plants.

I was still new to working in a more realistic style, but was determined to put this, my biggest painting to date, together within that short time frame. With much precise detail, careful observation, many all-nighters, and 53 hours of love The Beauty of Maui was born full of many small and big beautiful aspects of nature through the Maui rainforest. This piece shows me what so many can see if we put down our phones and look outside. There is so much beautiful nature around us that we take for granted. This piece was even more touching for me due to the destruction of the fire in Lahaina and the loss of so much art, history, and nature. I wanted to do justice to this rainforest by creating art based on the history of some of Maui's nature.