Blue tit foraging on pollard oak branch
oil on canvas, 1010mm x 760mm

Private collection

preparatory studies

The approach was Cezanne inspired. I painted these without glasses (I'm near sighted) to help me attend to the colours - one colour world of the outer leaves of the canopy and different  colour world within the lower branches.

Private collection

seeing and noticing

Over the winter, while I was working on this painting, Dr Chris Gibson from Natural England came to the tree and we spent an hour walking round it while he pointed out many things that I had seen but not noticed over the past two years.

One of them was in front of my nose, its colours are observed in both the colour studies above.

Chris is showing what a pollard branch does - there are several behind him. Oak branches have a zig-zag growth pattern that evolved to fit leaves into light-catching spaces in the canopies of competing trees. You can see this pattern clearly in the top left of the main picture above. But if an oak loses a low branch, it conserves energy by shooting out a pollard branch - leaves appear only at the tips, where the sunlight is. 

Learning this, I noticed that the pale yellow greens in the oil studies and photos I used belonged to pollard branches, and one of them became a focus of attention in the final painting. Without Chris's visit this would not have happened and the attention in the image would have been dispersed, as in the studies.

This is an example of creative, visual collabouration between art and science.