03‹ ›Vertical Divider
|
Portrait of a TreeOver the last year, a young oak tree has been the focus of my attention. It stands at the end of a drive of trees, lining the route to my Wednesday afternoon studio space. It was through the large open doors of the studio that I first took into myself the tree and its place in the surrounding landscape.
This tree captured my attention from the start, compelling me into a relationship so that I could make painterly marks, not to record a photographic image of what the tree looked like, but to express its own unique presence and spirit. I wanted to capture how I and the tree could contemplate each other. I was reminded of Martin Gaylord’s book, ‘The Man with the Blue Scarf: On Sitting for a Portrait by Lucien Freud’ in which Gayford writes about his many visits to the studio of Lucien Freud where he sat for the artist. The book, in part, is about the relationship that developed between the artist and the sitter, so too, this Gallery reveals something about my practice as a painter and how one tree became a kind of ‘sitter’ for me, waiting for my weekly visits to reveal more of its true nature and our developing relationship. |
|
