Spanning Central America is the tropical, mountainous country of Honduras. Honduras has a mixed ethnicity owing to British and Spanish colonial rule, along with a variety of indigenous groups that remained relatively intact during the hard times. With dense jungles, impassible terrain, and vast swamp lands and rivers, Honduras provided a lot of places for indigenous people to thrive. They became independent as a country in the 19th century although Mexico laid claim to the land for some time. The United States also interfered on a regular basis to protect the lucrative fruit companies that were operating in Honduras to grow bananas, plantains, pineapples, coffee, and sugar. Despite rampant deforestation, Honduras still has lush cloud jungles, which are forested areas on top of high mountains.
In the painting, I depicted a tree branch high atop a mountain in the cloud forest, with a rich variety of bromeliads (the pointy ones), ferns, orchids and mossy growths. Since this is supposed to be a landscape series, I composed the tree branch as if it were itself part of a landscape, complete with trees that look they are from an alien planet. The undulations of the branch look like rolling hills. The notion that tree branches could harbor such a garden of tropical plants came from a book on Honduras I got from the library authored by McGaffrey and Spilling.
World Inspired Landscapes: Honduras, watercolour 6 x 9" watercolour paper, March 2023 (No. 3379)
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