Returning to the Woods

Following the recent immersion in the photorealist portrait project, the Christmas recess has encouraged a return to thoughts of engaging with the local woodland and representations of the experience of being amidst that was providing the grist to the creative mill at this time last year and indeed continued into the Spring.

These considerations turned to active contemplation, with brushes being taken up and applied to a canvas that had originally been composed and underpainted last June, becoming a painting featuring as its image-content a mossily-floored copse of silver birches, indigenous trees that feature sporadically around the peripheries of the larger areas of commercially-planted pines and larches that still, after extensive culling early last year, form the bulk of the woodland.

On Saturday, some form of resolution of the canvas was arrived-at, an image of the resulting object, on the easel, pictured below.

‘Woodscape #8: Silver Birches’

oil on canvas/50 x 100cm/January 2018 (begun June 2017)

Previous rules apply, with the intention of achieving a painterly surface, a physical record, a ‘tactile space’ analogous to the empirical experience of being present in the woodland with its profusion tending to over-abundance of visual and other sensory information. Whilst keen to emphasise the texture of the support and medium, this was reined-back somewhat from the previous explorations, feeling them perhaps to have had a bit too much paint thrown at them for its own sake, resulting in a certain clagginess, hopefully allowing this canvas to breathe a little more. At the same time, the painting process was freed from the rigid horizontal/vertical brushwork of the previous attempts, led by the strict verticality of the subject matter of the pine trunks, which in retrospect seem a little too obvious. The nature of the silver birch bark lends itself to a more horizontal approach and this in turn helps achieve a more ‘overall’ surface. As ever, whilst trying to plot a path at least some way in to represented spatial depth, the application of the paint is intended to return the spectator to the immediate picture plane at any given moment, as might be appreciated from the details below.

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