My first exhibition at Juana de Aizpuru’s gallery consisted of paintings of old trees. Having come from Soledad Lorenzo before, I saw the exhibition as a kind of homage to the great women and gallerists who shaped the Spanish art market for so many years. While that connection may be largely private, Pando, the painting shown above, was part of it.

Pando may well be the largest and heaviest living being on Earth. What looks like a forest of individual trunks is in fact a single organism. It is a colony of quaking aspen, living in Utah, occupying over 100 acres and weighing more than 6,000 tons. The roughly 47,000 trunks that make up this being are genetically identical, all connected by a vast underground root system.

Aspen trees can reproduce sexually by seed, but they mostly propagate by cloning. It is all an illusion of individuality. While each trunk rarely lives longer than 130 years, the organism itself is estimated to be between 9,000 and 16,000 years old.

Pando must be especially impressive in autumn. Since all of the trunks share the same genetics, they all turn yellow and gold in unison. It must be like a short and synchronized finale for their year.

Quaking aspens are named for their movement. Their long leafstalks let the heart-shaped leaves tremble with even the slightest wind. In German, there is a phrase my father often uses: Zittern wie Espenlaub, meaning to shiver like aspen leaves. This might be either due to the cold or fright.

Aspens grow quickly, up to five feet per year, and their wood is soft, light, and ephemeral. It is rarely used for heroic objects, but rather for humble, everyday things: paper, matches, toothpicks. There is a striking contrast between the fleeting softness of the trunks and the immense resilience of the organism itself.

When an aspen loses a branch, the overgrowing bark often forms a dark scar that resembles an eye. In a grove like Pando, I imagine that you might feel surrounded by these eyes, all watchfully looking all around. It always makes me think of Baby Dee’s song “Road of Eyes That See,” from her album I Am a Stick:

And in the eyes of every tree
On that road of eyes that see,
I am determined to remain
A child of joy.