CZERNOWITZ (2018): When I visited my grandfather’s birthplace in the former Austro-Hungarian Empire, the city of Czernowitz, a former epicenter of European Jewish culture and mysticism (now Chernivitsi, located in western Ukraine), along its boulevards rows of pollarded trees reminded me of the radically trimmed street-side trees of my native Los Angeles that I had been painting, drawing and photographing over the last two decades. Three Czernowitz trees subsequently became the basis for a series of work painted on irregularly shaped panels of linen.