Untitled (The Tree of Life) depicts a blossoming plant with beautifully coloured leaves and flowers. Set against an unadorned paper ground, Morrisseau’s heavy black lines, decorated to their leafy interiors with joyful colours, is so pure and deliberate that the image borders on abstraction. The stylized vining foliate and simplified floral motifs, however, harken to the distinctive elements of the quillwork and beadwork found on older Anishinaabe clothing and other garments.

Morrisseau’s remarkable control of the brush (and, perhaps, his fingertips) is evidenced in The Tree of Life, where the composition is so fluid that it can only be described as calligraphic. The verticality of the image, the sheet for which is almost 5 ft tall, lends to the sense that the plant pushes upward from the earth, toward an unseen sun and creates a strong, most poetic impression.