Buy a $325 print, plant 165 trees: Artist hides prayers under gold to fund forests

Ekaterina Sky writes a prayer by hand on each painting in her “Prayer for the Earth” series, then covers it with gold leaf so no one can read it.

Viewers can still hear it. Sky said a chip in each painting plays a recording of her reading the prayer when tapped with a phone.

“So therefore, you are charging the painting with your intention, and the painting charges you back with it as well,” Sky told Urgent Matter in an interview Tuesday.

Sky, who splits her time between Los Angeles and Brooklyn, tied the series to Life Force Trees, her reforestation project. Signed prints will go on sale in November, and the project’s website says each will fund 50 to 165 native trees.

One night, she said, the prayer came to her when she could not sleep. She said she took it to mosques, synagogues, churches and Buddhist temples, as well as to her Kabbalah teacher and a Hindu monk, to ensure it honored each faith.

She used to paint endangered wildlife in acrylic, which she called “basically plastic,” and now works mostly in watercolor on paper. Her website describes the gold as sustainable 24-karat gold leaf.

Sky said she also painted wildlife murals on a world tour with groups including Animals Asia. Her résumé lists stops in India, Vietnam, Thailand, Mexico and the United States in 2019 and 2020.

Life Force Trees encourages each person to plant 165 native trees. The website says the number comes from Crowther Lab research at ETH Zurich, which estimates the planet can support about 1 trillion to 1.5 trillion more trees.

“We don’t plant trees ourselves, we support those that do,” Sky said.

Donations made through the Collidescope Foundation, the project’s fiscal sponsor, are tax-deductible. Donors can give $50 for 165 seedlings through Ecosia, $165 for 165 trees planted by One Tree Planted for wildfire recovery in California, or $660 for 165 rainforest trees in Borneo through Health In Harmony.

Sky said 10% of sales from her new “Prayer for the Earth” works will go toward planting trees.

Sky’s studio sells the prints, each of which is associated with a stated number of trees to be planted. Purchases are not tax-deductible.

The website lists The Reliques, a 25-by-19-inch print in an edition of 450, at $325 and says it plants 165 trees. Three 10-by-8-inch prints are listed at $125 each in editions of 350 and plant 50 trees each. Sky pays for those trees herself.

Sky said Vegan Printer makes the prints using soy ink, with the prayer reproduced beneath stamped gold foil.

“I didn’t want to take a photo of the painting and then print it out, you know, it felt to me like it would be losing its essence,” she said.

The project’s homepage showed 3,801 trees pledged Tuesday, toward a goal of 16,500 from its first 100 supporters. Visitors can also register trees they planted themselves.

Asked how the project confirms people actually planted the trees they register, Sky said the form asks where, how many, and what kind. The project encourages people to share photos. She said she did not see why anyone “would just be like, I didn’t plant trees, but let me go register my trees.”

The website says trees people log on their own are marked pending until someone reviews them.

Sky said donations go to partner groups she trusts, and “they’re all planted.”

Sky traces the project to Borneo, which she first visited in 2019 after seeing a video of an orangutan clinging to one of the last trees in its forest and fighting off a bulldozer. She rented a wooden boat with a guide and flew a drone over a river, with rainforest on one bank and monoculture plantations on the other.

“Honestly, at first, I lost all the hope,” she said.

Back home during the COVID-19 pandemic, Sky said, a doctor named Jonathan who had worked at a clinic in Borneo told her about Health In Harmony. She said she asked the group for reports and read a book by its founder before traveling to see its work.

Sky said she finds planting partners through word of mouth and site visits, and works only with groups that plant native trees to avoid introducing invasive species.

Health In Harmony and its Indonesian partner, Alam Sehat Lestari, or ASRI, have worked around Gunung Palung National Park in West Kalimantan since 2007, the group says. Its medical center accepts tree seedlings and other non-cash payments, and the group has used discounted care to encourage villages to stop logging.

“If we don’t have healthcare, and if someone in our family is sick, we’re gonna do whatever it takes to save the person we love,” Sky said, recounting what residents told the group.

Health In Harmony says a 10-year analysis by Stanford University researchers, published in PNAS, found more than a 90% drop in logging households, a 67% drop in infant mortality and 21,000 hectares of forest regrowth.

Sky later painted a mural for Health In Harmony of human lungs with birds, flowers and forest coming out of them. She said, “the lungs were the forests of the world.”

At home, she brought the “Prayer for the Earth” series to a wall in Altadena after the Eaton fire. Residents and volunteers spent four days in July 2025 painting the wall with her at the former Oh Happy Day Vegan Cafe, placing their own written prayers inside its layers, her website says.

A woman came up during the painting and pointed out a friend smiling with a brush in her hand, Sky said.

“She’s my dear friend, and she lost her home in fires, and I didn’t see her smile for the past six months,” Sky recalled the woman saying.

Sky said Life Force Trees has also rallied volunteers through partner groups to replant trees in Altadena.

Sky said she evacuated three times while living in Topanga and again during the January 2025 fires. She said she developed asthma while living near Lincoln Heights, a dense part of Los Angeles with few trees, and moved about a month after those fires.

“My doctor was like, Darling, if you want to feel better, you know, you gotta move,” she said.

Another painting, from her “At the Core We Are One” series, shows a DNA strand rising from human hands shaped into a lotus. She said she set it up in Echo Park under a sign reading “at the core we are one” and invited passersby to leave gold fingerprints on it.

During an augmented reality installation of “Prayer for the Earth” in Times Square around the 2025 Tribeca Festival, Sky said, she asked passersby for a prayer or wish for the planet.

“I barely got anything,” she said. “Majority of people went into self-promotion.”

Sky said she brought her painting Forests of the World to COP30, the United Nations climate conference in Belém, Brazil, to talk about the role trees play in the water cycle through what she called “sky rivers.”

A UNFCCC webcast shows her on the panel at a November 18, 2025, press conference hosted by the Abibimman Foundation and titled “Planet B: Saving Our Planet with Integrity.”

Carnegie Hall’s event listing shows Sky among the speakers at a January 11 youth peace concert in Weill Recital Hall.

Sky moved from country to country with her mother as a child. She was bullied, did not speak the language and found that other children were kinder to her when she drew.

Her family pushed her to study business instead of art, and she does not have an arts degree. Her résumé lists a bachelor’s degree in international business from Concordia University in Montreal, along with earlier art classes in Russia and Israel.

She committed to art full time about 10 years ago.

“I kneeled in front of my wall of paintings, and I said, from now on, I’m a visual artist, and this is all I’m gonna do,” she said. “I committed. That’s it.”

Her parents did not come to her first solo exhibition. Her mother and stepfather came to the second, she said.

“They were walking so proud,” she said.

Asked about the warm sunset colors in her paintings, Sky said they’re tied to a project she’s worked on for five years, including more than 100 days of silence. She said it will be released soon, and she will share details then.

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