There’s much to admire in an aspen tree. Its expansive presence for one; stands of aspen cover 5 million of Colorado’s acres — that’s 20% of the state’s forested land. Its captivating capacity for tree song for another; its fluttering leaves deliver a notorious whisper, or sizzle, as they shimmy in a breeze.

The unique way an aspen photosynthesizes impresses, too; it’s the only tree whose bark can spin sunlight into sugar. Most wondrous, maybe, is its genealogy. From a single seed can grow an entire clonal colony.

Aspens have been used for medicines and messages, lauded in poetry and literature. They attract droves of hikers and leaf peepers to Colorado each year to experience their towering, quaking beauty.

But above all, the trees’ papery white bark and radiantly golden fall leaves are a siren call for artists.

“I love aspen trees,” says Emily Fair, a painter who co-owns the eclectic 45 Degree Gallery in Old Colorado City. She’s inspired by the way their crisp white trunks stand out against a field of greens and browns, the personalities they seem to take on. “And, of course, the golden leaves in the fall — they look like sparkling coins or sequins against the forest.”

Standing among aspens in the fall is “magical,” Fair says, “almost like you’re in a snow globe but it’s showering golden leaves on you … I can’t get enough of it.”

When Fair moved to Colorado Springs in 2003 and started working at a gallery, she didn’t understand artists’ or collectors’ fascination with aspens. The trees she saw nearby were scrawny and unimpressive.

That was before an autumn hike on McClure Pass, where Fair took in a magnificent grove resplendent with tall, thick trees crowned in gold and quaking in the wind.

“Then I got it, and then I understood the fascination,” she says.

Fair is now one of many Colorado artists striving to recreate the wonder and beauty of aspens through painting. In some of her works, the trees sit atop geometric patchwork colorscapes that use the stark black-and-white trunk to provide a focal point for the restless, searching eye.

People might not walk into her gallery looking for an aspen painting specifically, but visitors are often “surprised and delighted by the nontraditional approaches our artists take to portraying such an iconic Colorado tree,” she says.

Artist Carl Bork, who owns Bork & Watkins Gallery in Salida, was a figurative artist — depicting people mostly — when he moved west and was struck by the human-like presence of aspens. He’s been painting them ever since.

Painting outdoors recharges his inspiration, and he thinks aspens can present a multitude of ideas and feelings through art. “They all have their own unique look, whether the twisty ones or the great up-and-down ones, the big ones, how knotty they are, and you can play with the composition and how you lay them out in the scene,” he says. “There’s really a lot you could do with them.”

That’s something he pointed out to fellow painter Laura Reilly, a landscape artist who calls “Colorado” her favorite color and paints out of a hole-in-the-wall studio and gallery a few doors down from Fair.

Paintings exalting aspens adorn her walls, with vivid golden hues in textured layers evoking the trees in their autumn attire. Other paintings present the aspens more softly, framing Mt. Silverheels near Alma in shades of green; gently suggesting a path through a sunlit meadow.

Reilly says she is captivated by the way aspens change: from location to location, season to season, grove to grove. By the way they seem to turn the very light around them golden in the fall, when their leaves announce the season with their recognizable rattle. And by the way these identical trees show off their variations.

“Even though they’re all aspens, in terms of how sparse or compact they are, how tall they are, how delicate or dense the foliage is, they’re all different,” Reilly says.

Those differences stand out to Reilly as she quietly observes a scene, the landscape slowly opening up for her as she sketches what she sees and, somehow, what she feels.

She calls her aspen paintings souvenirs — not in the way of key chains or postcards but in how they can capture and hold a sense of place. “I think that people recognize themselves in paintings, and what they recognize is their experience,” Reilly says.

It could explain why aspen paintings are marketable: they appeal to anyone who has felt that wonder at the natural world, a feeling that speaks to them through a painting even if they haven’t stood in that exact spot.

And why artists, despite the trees’ ubiquitous presence on canvas, continue to paint them.