More entries on 'The Trees'
The Gone Forest
Two years ago I shot some video at Shotover Country Park (see 'Writing Shadows') and finally, this weekend, I had the chance to edit the clips together to make a piece entitled 'The Gone Forest'. The piece is something viewers ...
Writing Shadows
On Tuesday I made my way to Shotover to work on a piece I've been thinking about for quite some time. The piece, about absent-presence, will, eventually, comprise videos of shadows in a wood, a few stills from which can ...
Latest Tree Drawings
I've been working on a series of drawings for a while now, the development of which can be seen in the pictures below ...
Somewhere Between Writing and Trees II
More work using the iPad Pro and pencil ...
Somewhere Between Writing and Trees
Having recently bought and iPad Pro and pencil, I decided to start drawing in a style inspired to some extent by my son's drawings and by my recent visit to Shotover wood, and, I have to say, I was pleased with ...
Mondrian’s Trees
This weekend, I was drawing with my children. Eliot was drawing in his usual style... ...and as I watched, I took up my felt-tip pen and began to draw. Having drawn my lines, I began to do what I used to ...
Trees Triptych No.2
Another triptych comprising photographs taken on Sunday at Shotover ...
Trees Triptych
A triptych comprising photographs taken at Shotover on Sunday ...
A Walk in Shotover Wood
On what was a beautiful Autumn day, I took a walk to Shotover wood to take some photos of trees. I've always loved Shotover, both for its place in my past and that of my family, and its own history, ...
Trees and Other Projects
I have been photographing the same trees - shown above - for almost 18 months now, and what started as a simple photographic record of a particular set of trees has since morphed into a project which shares certain aspects ...
Two Worlds
I was thinking about the post World War I landscape and how the years after 1918 saw a surge in spiritualism with grieving parents, wives and children seeking solace in the idea of their loved ones' continued existence on 'the ...
Proposing Moments of Pastoral
Through my research on World War I, I've accumulated a large amount of data - postcards, quotes, maps, texts, photographs, personal thoughts and experiences - which I want to start distilling into a new body of work. To do that, ...
The Past in Pastoral
July 1st 2016 will mark the 100th anniversary of the infamous Somme offensive. Having already made a lot of work about World War I, I want to mark this anniversary with some new pieces, working around the theme of 'shared ...
The Lawn and the Woods
I remember as a small boy how my Nana would on occasion take me and my older brother to where she worked as a Housekeeper. The house was - at far as I recall - a big, white, Modernist building ...
Silence in the Woods
I've discussed previously, three extracts from newspapers in which a moment of silence serves to amplify all that happened before and after. To recap, those three extracts were [my italics in all]:"On Sunday last, at the close of the evening ...
Silence as Other
The past is silent. To know the past, one must know silence. The theme of silence has come up a lot in my work, something I've written about before (see Augmenting Silence), and it was whilst re-reading a blog on Chinese painting ...
The Gesture of Mourning
Graveyards and cemeteries have always fascinated me. The feeling I have when entering them, is much the same as when I enter a museum, a sense of calm mixed with expectation as I wonder whose story or stories I'll encounter ...
The First Line?
Reading Clive James' Poetry Notebook, I find myself a little better prepared to tackle the task of writing a poem; something I've wanted to do since the start of the New Year. I've made attempts in the past which I ...
Proxies
Following on from my last entry I've been wondering whether an empathetic link between ourselves and those who fought and died in the First World War can - based on Paul Fussel's quote regarding "moments of pastoral" ("if the opposite ...
Chinese Landscape Painting
I've never before considered myself a fan of Chinese art but there have been times (most recently in the British Museum) when I've been overawed by a particular work. I refer in particular to early (11th-14th century) landscapes which move ...
Lamenting Trees
'Ghastly by day, ghostly by night, the rottenest place on the Somme'. Such was how soldiers described High Wood, one of the many that peppered the battlefields of Flanders and France. Woods in name only, these once dense places were ...
War and The Pastoral Landscape
I've been thinking these last few weeks about a new body of work based on the First World War. For a long time - as will be evident from my blog - I've been looking at ways of using the ...
Goethean Observation: Compost Heap
The compost heap is some eight feet in circumference and about three feet high at its highest point. It comprises many different types of vegetative matter, at a glance; apples, the branches of the Christmas tree, twigs, cut-down shrubs, leaves ...
Absence
In the Tenth Elegy of Rilke's Duino Elegies we read:'...Our ancestorsworked the mines, up there in the mountain range.Among men, sometimes you still find polished lumpsof original grief or - erupted from an ancient volcano -a petrified clinker of rage ...
Paul Nash Quote
"Here in the back garden of the trenches it is amazingly beautiful - the mud is dried to a pinky colour and upon the parapet, and through sandbags even, the green grass pushes up and waves in the breeze, while ...
The Keening Landscape
I sometimes think of these images as pieces of theatre. There's the stage on which a man stands wearing his costume. He leans on a prop - a chair, the scenery hanging behind him; a pastoral scene with trees and ...
Quotes from ‘Trees’
Trees - Woods and Western Civilisation by Richard Hayman"...the forest provides the setting for chance encounters that take the protagonists away from their everyday lives. Woodland is the gateway to a parallel reality of the underworld, but it is also ...
Trees
In his book, Trees - Woodlands and Western Civilization, archaeologist Richard Hayman writes:"...the forest provides the setting for chance encounters that take the protagonists away from their everyday lives. Woodland is the gateway to a parallel reality of the underworld, ...
A Backdrop to Eternity
Below is a typical, early 20th century studio portrait. The subject - a boy - sits on a prop. Behind him hangs a backdrop on which is painted an idealised scene - something like the view of a country estate ...
Redshift
Anyone who has stood on the edge of the Lochnagar crater at La Boiselle in France, cannot help but be overawed by its vast size. The result of a huge mine, detonated below ground at 7:28am on 1st July 1916 ...
Scroll Work
I’ve been looking at ways of developing work with scrolls and in particular, how to utilise the background of the scroll to compliment the character (the main focus of the artwork).
It was whilst looking through some old family photographs that I found one of my grandparents, taken at Shotover in 1952. This is the wood where I have been spending time recently, painting the characters for use in the scrolls.
Taking the photograph of my grandparents, I had the idea of using that as the background image, with two of the characters painted in the woods (see image above) positioned on top. The result was, for me, unexpectedly moving.
I’ve always been interested in the idea of the ‘nowness’ of a past event, and how, when we look, for example, at a photograph from the distant past, we can find details that help articulate that sense of now. For me, in the photograph of my grandparents, it’s the shadows at the top of the tree trunk. They point to the space beyond the edges of the photo – the sun, the sky, the canopy of the trees etc. and that sense of ‘now’ is further articulated by the characters painted on top, after all, they are themselves tracings of shadows painted at a particular moment in time.