Inside Haleh Mashian's Tree Series: Nature, Resilience, and the Art of Feeling
There are painters who render trees, and there are painters who paint what trees feel like. Haleh Mashian belongs unequivocally to the second category.
Her Tree Series, one of the most acclaimed and collected bodies of work in her three-decade practice, does not ask you to look at a forest. It asks you to step inside one. Through large-scale mixed media canvases built up with impasto, collage, and sculptural layering, Mashian translates the energy, resilience, and quiet authority of trees into paintings that feel as much physical as visual. The result is work that stops you. Collectors recognize it immediately. Interior designers reach for it when a room needs not just beauty, but presence.
What the Tree Series Is Really About
Art critic Peter Frank put it best: Haleh Mashian "does not paint trees. She does not paint forests. She paints the condition that persists between trees and forests and those of us who enter those forests and approach those trees as manifestations of energy and mood. These are paintings of presences and at the same time of emotional and mental weather."
That description captures something essential. The Tree Series is not botanical, not illustrative, and not landscape in the traditional sense. Each canvas explores the interplay of positive and negative space, the push and pull between what is visible and what is felt. The trees are structural, vertical, monumental, but the real subject is always the atmosphere between them.
Mashian has spoken about why trees hold such sustained power over her imagination: "I want to emulate trees because I feel they are resilient and rooted in the ground, just beautiful. They bend to anything that comes their way. They're surrounded by the elements, but it makes them stronger. I feel their energy."
For an artist whose own life has required extraordinary resilience, from fleeing Iran as a young woman to building a new life and a thriving gallery from the ground up, trees are not a neutral subject. They are a mirror.
The Making of the Series: Materials and Method
What makes the Tree Series visually distinct is Mashian's commitment to materiality. These are not paintings you can fully experience on a screen. In person, the surfaces rise and recede. Tree trunks built from layers of paint, gel medium, and mixed media cast actual shadow. Canopies of foliage emerge from intricate layering of pigment and texture, catching light differently throughout the day.
Mashian draws artistic inspiration from Wolf Kahn and Anselm Kiefer, two painters on opposite ends of the color and material spectrum. From Kahn, she inherits a fearlessness with color, the willingness to push a forest into pure chromatic experience. From Kiefer, she inherits a gravity, a sense that paint applied with physical force carries psychological weight. In the Tree Series, both impulses coexist. A single canvas can move from shimmering gold to deep charcoal, from earthy umber to luminous silver, within the same stand of trees.
The palette ranges widely across the series: deep alizarin reds and burnt umbers, shimmering silvers, midnight blues, creamy whites, and the warm glow of copper and gold. No two works are the same. Each is a distinct environment with its own light, season, and emotional temperature.
Featured Works from the Tree Series
Lush Escape II
Carved directly into wood and built up with layers of mixed media, Lush Escape II transforms the forest into a radiant field of color, rhythm, and movement. The carved outlines and layered pigments create an organic sense of connection, as if each tree is part of a larger dance of nature. Light catches on different passages throughout the day, adding new dimension with every hour. This is the Tree Series at its most joyful: resilient, alive, electric with vitality.
Blue Moon
Among the works created for the Grove of Enchantment solo exhibition, Blue Moon takes the Tree Series into more dreamlike territory. Cool nocturnal blues dominate the composition, with trees rendered in sculptural relief against a luminous, moon-washed ground. The painting holds its own specific quietness, the stillness of a forest at night, where the trees seem to breathe. Collectors drawn to art that shifts the emotional register of a room have responded strongly to this piece.
Metallica II
At 84" x 168", Metallica II is the most monumental work in this collection. Mashian reimagines the forest as a prismatic dreamscape, where slender trunks reminiscent of birch or aspen are fractured by cascading hues of emerald, amethyst, tangerine, and violet against a shimmering, silver-dusted ground. The rhythmic repetition of vertical forms draws the eye upward into a sensation of endless depth, as if the entire scene exists in perpetual transformation. A meditation on perception, Metallica II challenges the viewer to see beyond the familiar and into the extraordinary, a forest that pulses with energy, mystery, and an undeniable sense of transcendence.
Moulin Rouge
Moulin Rouge is one of the boldest and most arresting works in the series. Vibrant reds and deep magentas charge the composition with urgency and warmth, the vertical tree trunks anchoring what might otherwise feel like pure chromatic energy. It is a painting that commands the walls it inhabits — unapologetic in color, rich in texture. For collectors who want the Tree Series at full expressive intensity, this is the piece.
Solo Exhibition: The Tree Series on View
The Tree Series anchored a major solo exhibition at MASH Gallery:
Grove of Enchantment (September 2024) was the most ambitious presentation of the Tree Series to date, timed to MASH Gallery's sixth anniversary. Fantasy-inflected and immersive, the exhibition invited viewers into dream forests — colorful, fully articulated, layered environments that alternated between sharp relief and atmospheric depth. Mashian also directed a portion of the exhibition's proceeds toward TreePeople, the Los Angeles environmental organization, making her commitment to trees as living systems as concrete as her commitment to them as artistic subjects.
Why the Tree Series Resonates with Collectors
The Tree Series occupies a rare position in the contemporary art market: it is both emotionally legible and formally sophisticated. You do not need an art education to feel what these paintings are doing. But the more time you spend with them — the closer you look at the material decisions, the color relationships, the spatial dynamics — the more there is to discover.
Interior designers gravitate toward the series for its scale, its tonal range, and its ability to anchor a room without competing with it. Collectors who live with these works describe them as paintings that change throughout the day as natural light shifts across the textured surface.
They are, in every sense, alive.
Commission Your Own Tree Series Work
Haleh Mashian accepts commissions for custom Tree Series paintings, working closely with collectors and designers to develop pieces that respond to specific spaces, color palettes, and intentions. Whether you are building your personal collection or sourcing art for a hospitality or commercial project, the Tree Series can be tailored to your needs.
To inquire about available works or commission a custom painting, contact us here.
Browse the full Tree Series collection at www.halehmashian.com.
Haleh Mashian is a Los Angeles-based contemporary artist and founder of MASH Gallery in West Hollywood. Her work is held in private collections across the United States and internationally. The Tree Series is available for purchase and commission through halehmashian.com.
