Oak, wood pigeon, elm sapling and oil seed rape
Oil on canvas, 1550mm x 1150mm, framed
private collection, Australia
The oak from a glider at 1000ft.
On a cloudless afternoon in May, painted from about 40 meters,
close enough to see many different greens. The afternoon light gave
rich shadows against bright turquoise. There were only a few
days like this each year so I added to the study over three years.
The painting itself took four years.
Head-on sunlight creates a flattening effect which you might see
in a pub sign image or a stained glass window. To develop this idea
I took photos from 100 meters - much further away than the oil
study above - using a zoom lense. The lense gives the photos a
shallow space. Also, from a distance you can appreciate the general
shape of the tree more easily.
Combining the photographic and painted sources gives the
painting the wide range of colour seen close up and the
simplification seen from a distance. This helps the image to feel
both seen and imagined at the same time, something like an emblem
embedded in vision.
A digital selection tool was used to analyse the distribution of
similar colours within each photo. In nature the distribution of
similar colours often reveals a texture, and colour-textures can
help us see complicated things more clearly. Below are sample
yellow-greens removed from the photo above:
Colours from the oil study were then mapped onto
digital selections. Printouts of selections like the one above were
used as a guide for the distribution of oil study colours in the
painting. This gives the painting a clear sense of
colour-textures.
canvas
The under painting was built up in thin
acrylic:
Oil layers were then added. The mutual enhancement of film and
surface colour modes can't be done with a photo because a
photograph has only one surface quality. But it's a stock in trade
of oil painting. Here it makes the background float like coloured
glass behind the fat green sculpture of the tree:
A centerpiece for a show at Vertigo in
Shoreditch, the second of two shows based on the same field in
North Essex. The first show featured a series of panoramas. Afterwards, I wanted to work
with something smaller. I chose an oak in a hedge, next to a modern
crop.
As far as background and meaning goes, trust the
tale not the teller. These are just suggestions:
Close observation tries to grasp the tree as a unique
individual, but clarification and artifice suggest an oak tree of
the mind, an idea.
There are multiple time frames : oaks have been around for
millennia; this one has been alive for about two hundred and fifty
years ; an Elm sapling lives just a few years before it succumbs to
Dutch Elm disease; the modern crop takes a few weeks to ripen; the
light was like this for an hour or two each day; the pigeon flew
past in seconds.
The oil seed rape variety,
"Lioness", was bred in Germany for high yield, fed on
petrochemical derived nitrogen and was sold for manufacturing
oil-seed petrol that could be used anywhere in the world. The tree
is growing only a few miles from where John Constable worked and he
may have seen this very tree, but he would not have seen a crop
like this.
The bird reminded me of birds in the poetry of Gerard Manley
Hopkins, for example "the Holy Ghost over the bent / World broods
with warm breast and with ah! bright wings." (see foot note on this
page).
Various personal oaks may be behind the painting:
A big oak outside my primary school gate in Wolverhampton and
the school cap badge. There are lots of oak trees in the suburb
where I grew up.
An oak tree in a valley painted in the 1920's by my grandfather,
Jack Taylor, a brewery clerk. The painting is formulaic but refers
to a real location.
Pub sign showing the oak King Charles II hid in to avoid
Cromwell's men.
The wider cultural significance of oak trees is easy to
explore.
The painting leaving a studio on the fens for
Sydney, Australia.
* from God's Grandeur, a sonnet dated 1877. In
July 1866 Hopkins wrote in his journal :
" I have now found the law of the oak leaves. It
is of platter-shaped stars altogether; the leaves lie close like
pages, packed, and as if drawn tightly together. But to these old
packs, wh. lie at the end of their twigs, throw out now long shoots
alternately and slimly leaved, looking like bright keys. All the
sprays but markedly these ones shape out and as it were embrace
greater circles and the dip and toss of these make the wider and
less organic articulations of the tree."
Gerard Manley Hopkins, Poems and Prose. Ed W.H.
Gardner, Penguin. P. 109
This intense natural observation is part of a
tradition linking science and art that comes down to us through the
Enlightenment. But Hopkins' attempt to get almost inside the
natural world and to empathise with the non-human connects to
pre-industrial, pre-scientific culture. Anglo Saxon riddles come to
my mind where, for example, the poet imagines what it's like to be
a swan or an onion.