Winter Triptych

Everyone I’ve met in Michigan so far has asked why I chose to move here from Hawaii, where I was born and raised. Though the islands are lovely, I could not resist the transformation and rebirth of the world in each of the four seasons — but most intensely in winter.

With this triptych, I hope to draw your attention to the views that enchanted me for the first time only a few years ago. In the bitterest cold and grayest of overcasts, I still see a wonderland. Even a gas station takes on an abstract beauty when blanketed smoothly in white. Snow can make anything beautiful because it unifies all objects it touches with a soft, white side from a shared direction. Sunlight has the same effect, creating light and dark parts of multiple things, seemingly chaotic, but from a single direction. Atmospheric perspective, too, created by airborne particles like snowflakes, accentuates the depth of far-away trees and hills. Their edges become lost, visible but obscured by otherwise invisible specks of snow.