Professional fine artist Sue Clancy has been practicing noticing and appreciating the mundane things in her life. Doing this, she finds, relieves stress and helps maintain her curiosity and joy of living. Recently she noticed that she’d been seeing the beautiful trees in her neighborhood without really paying attention. So, she decided to created portraits of some of them so she could enjoy their shapes, colors and "moods" - their personalities so to speak. She selected six trees and made 24 portraits using ink, watercolor, gouache and color pencil. These portraits are tiny, only 3.5 x 2.5 inches, and she created them over several months, one at a time, while looking out her windows during breakfast.
Also, as part of her effort to notice and pay attention to her neighborhood trees - or "my neighbor trees" as she called them - she read several books, stories and poems related to trees. Some of them are listed in the back of this book.