Rivers Feed the Trees | Meredith Nemirov
Our previous article – The Walking Forest – celebrated the quiet power of trees. This new feature follows the rivers that feed them, presenting the work of an artist whose meditative engagement with landscape evokes both reverence and alarm.
For her series Rivers Feed the Trees, Meredith Nemirov has painted directly onto antique topographic maps of Colorado – once utilitarian tools of exploration, now symbolically re-purposed. These works, created in the aftermath of devastating wildfires and pandemic isolation, chart a reclamation of sorts of the American West. Each river, elegantly painted, becomes both homage and clarion call, a gesture toward the ceremonial, and an invitation to reawaken our kinship with water in a time of ecological upheaval.
In her new exhibition Rivers Feed the Trees; The Moon Moves the Tides, on view at Milk Moon Gallery, the artist collaborates with map-makers of another era to envision a West not defined by drought, but by renewal.
S.W. Colorado and Parts of AZ, UT & NV
Imagining the West Without Drought
by Meredith Nemirov
The winter of 2020. We were nine months into the pandemic and it was the first winter since that dreadful summer of the worst wildfires in Colorado in twenty years. Spending the days, like so many artists around the world, confined to my studio trying to focus on work, I also took the opportunity to look through older works from all of my flat files and that’s when I discovered them: the old topographic maps we had saved from when we had a gallery that specialised in antique maps, prints and books about the exploration of the American West.
It is hard for me to put into words why I decided to paint rivers and aspen trees onto these old topographic maps of Colorado. I looked back at my journals from that time:
November 17, 2020: Just titled three pieces ‘The River Feeds the Tree’ and then I remembered where I had heard that before:
‘Chaos Feeds the Tree’ from William Carlos Williams’ book of poems titled Spring And All.
From disorder (a chaos)
order grows
— grows fruitful
The chaos feeds it. Chaos
feeds the tree.
It seemed to fit the zeitgeist of the feelings, ideas and attitudes of what we were experiencing.
S.W. Colorado and parts of Utah
Installation view of artworks at Milk Moon Gallery
Since I moved to this rural area of southwestern Colorado in 1988 I have been mainly an observational painter and the experience of spending this time of intense seeing while drawing and painting among the aspen trees has led to visual explorations of naturally occurring phenomenon, like in the series of abstract works titled Blowdown, which depicts the mycorrhizal fungi growing beneath the forest floor.
My recent series Rivers Feed the Trees are works on paper, original historic topographic maps of Colorado, addressing the issue of climate change specifically regarding water in the West and Southwestern United States. After that dire summer of extreme wildfires a figurative conflagration occurred in my studio which resulted in this series representing a “re-watering” of the landscape. This visual representation is meant to be akin to a Native American rain dance ceremony, a weather-modification ritual that attempts to invoke rain.
Installation view of artworks at Milk Moon Gallery
Come spring of 2021 and after all those days of painting blue into every river, canyon, arroyo and stream on the maps, I walked down to the river to paint the spring runoff hoping it was good and strong enough to deal with the coming summer. I live in a wide valley close to the banks of the Uncompahgre River who runs down from the San Juan Mountains in southwestern Colorado.
I have always enjoyed painting moving water and now it had so much more significance for me.
River One, San Miguel | Watercoluor, 5 x 8 inches
River Study Two | Watercolour, 5 x 8 inches
“To put your hand in a river is to feel the chords that bind the earth together.”
What Barry Lopez wrote about rivers has been a guiding light for me. As I sat by the riverside painting those “chords” I could feel what he meant and I thought about how we have constrained our rivers with levees, channelisation and cement banks and beds. We have fragmented them with dams and diversions. We have repressed them by regulating their natural flow, removing obstacles and manipulating boundaries. All of this engineering has reduced the resilience of rivers and has made them more susceptible to the effects of a warmer, drier climate.
The Dolores, The Take Out | The Dolores, The Rapids | The Dolores, The Put In
Installation at Milk Moon Gallery
“If there is magic on this planet it is contained in water.”
Back in the studio I continued to collaborate with the cartographers who went out into the landscape over 100 years ago and walked along the rivers in my part of the country. They created visually compelling abstract images using shape, colour, lines and patterns to represent aspects of the land, visible and invisible. These are the maps that I fell in love with years ago in our gallery when I first saw the Hayden Geological Survey of 1871.
As I paint a network of branching, intertwining waterways into the topography of the maps I am walking along the riverbanks along with those cartographers. Nurtured by the abundance of rivers and streams, stands of aspen trees sprout and flourish in my re-watered landscapes, standing tall in the face of an uncertain future.
Apishapa River II
Arkansas & St Charles Rivers I
“When water slips through roots, rises through a trunk, streams into leaves...”
River Earths / Night Moons
Installation view of artworks at Milk Moon Gallery
Rivers Feed the Trees; The Moon Moves the Tides opened on May 23rd, 2025 at Milk Moon Gallery in Telluride, Colorado. The exhibition is a collaboration with and benefit for the nonprofit American Rivers, and features new works made specially for the gallery focussed on Colorado waterways. The gallery’s inaugural show is a reflection on rivers, their crucial role in healthy environments, and the threats they face as a result of climate change, pollution, damming and other anthropogenic interventions.
Artwork images used with permission; installation shots courtesy of Milk Moon Gallery | Text by Meredith Nemirov, 2025 | Please do not re-publish any of the above without prior written consent
