Oak, wood pigeon, elm sapling and oil seed rape
Oil on canvas, 1550mm x 1150mm, framed
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The oak from a glider at 1000ft.
oil study
On a cloudless afternoon in May, painted from about 40 meters, close enough to see many different greens. The afternoon light made rich shadows against bright turquoise above the horizon.
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.
photos
Head-on sunlight creates a flattening effect that you might see on a pub sign or stained glass window. To develop this idea, photos were taken from 100meters with a zoom lense (much further away than the oil study). This gives the photos a shallow space, and from a distance you can also see more of the crown.
Thus the painting has both the wide range of colour seen close up in the oil study and the simplifying effects of photos taken from a distance. This helps the image to feel both seen and imagined at the same time, something like an emblem embedded in vision.
colour-textures
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 yellow greens removed from the photo above right:
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. Shade areas are made using glazes, creating a luminous film appearance. The sky also has the same depthless, luminous quality. These film areas are contrasted with the more thickly painted, opaque surfaces of leaves, branches and seed pods in the light.
This mutual enhancement of film and surface colour modes can’t be done with a photo, but it's a stock in trade of oil painting. In this case it makes the background float like coloured glass behind the green sculpture of the tree:
ideas
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 at King’s College Cambridge featured a series of panoramas. Following this, I wanted to work with a smaller thing. I chose an oak in a hedge, next to a modern crop.
It doesn't always help to know what an artist thinks about his work- trust the tale not the teller. These are just suggestions:
Close observation tries to grasp the tree as an individual, showing a richness unique to time and place. At the same time 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.” * This familiar Christian image appears in art in many forms.
There are various personal oaks that may also be behind the painting:
above left : a very big oak outside my primary school gate in Wolverhampton. There are many oaks in the suburb where I grew up.
above right: my first school cap badge, with the oak tree
above left: an oak tree in a valley painted in the 1920's by my grandfather, Jack Taylor, a brewery clerk.
above right: a pub sign referring to the oak King Charles II hid in to avoid Cromwell's men.
The wider cultural significance of oak trees is easy to explore.
* 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 from the enlightenment. But Hopkins' attempt almost to get inside the natural world, to empathise with the non-human, connects to pre-industrial, pre-scientific culture. Anglo Saxon riddles come to mind where, for example, the poet imagines what it's like to be a swan, or even an onion.