‘Tiz the season, is it not? Where trees are starting to burst forth with leaves, blossoms, colour & sticky “bits” underfoot.
There was a trend in history when landscapes, scenery, mountains, nature & such suddenly became interesting & beautiful. Before then, there wasn’t much uptake on artworks portraying it either. No-one was bothered about it; probably everyone was too busy variously avoiding sabre-toothed tigers, getting hung, drawn & quartered or the Black Death, depending on which era they belonged to. No-one had time for fripperies, niceties or actually enjoying their lives. That said, more people had a healthy fear of thundering deities than they do now. We tend not to be worried about sacrificing or even whether we’ve sinned at all in many cases.
Yes, people were more concerned about the state of their souls than their surroundings. It took mankind a while to realise that all the stuff of a landscape was good for you; it could cheer you up & if you wanted to be religious about it, showed what an amazing deity yours was to have set it all up.
As we fumble around the 21st Century, mostly wondering what the blazes is going on, we’ve forgotten again what is good for us. Most things in our lives are some sort of means to some sort of end, e.g. work, buses, beer, but what is in nature is an end in itself. We are part of it & we need to remember that.
I forget whether I’ve mentioned My Favourite Tree in any past blogs. I’m happy to talk about it again. It’s a copper beech tree in an Aberdeen graveyard - Nellfield Cemetery - & it’s just enormous. Its shape is also pretty distinctive & it's imposing in its context. I worry that one day it’ll get too big for its context. Several trees in that graveyard have been brought down by storms. My tree is bare at the moment, but when it sprouts its beautiful leaves, it’ll look even more majestic. It’s nice to have a favourite tree (I’m sure I’ve written that before) & maybe you have one too. I’m fortunate to see mine on a regular basis & I always say a little internal hello to it in thanks for cheering me up.
You don’t have to look too far to find some amazing artworks depicting trees. They are incredibly varied, as you might expect & come in all kinds of media.
I view trees as their own means to their own end and the art world reflects that. It’s not just a load of old Constables.
Graham Sutherland (1903-1980), Thorn Tree (1945-6)
As surreal & spiky as the mighty Sutherland’s trees are, they’re still oddly but completely recognisable. He applies his own artistic magic to them & they’re at once both Sutherland & trees.
William Gear (1915-1997), Black Tree (1950)
A fascinating Scottish artist, Gear was known for his abstract work. Like Sutherland’s this lithograph is undeniably tree-like. Despite not having the obvious constituent tree parts, there’s certainly something of the organic in there, as dark & tangled as it is.
Salvador Dalí (1904-1989), The Three Sphinxes of Bikini (1947)
There’s a tree on my journey to work that comes into full leaf first on that part of the road & when it does, it looks very like a giant stem of broccoli. What we have with Dalí reminds me more of cauliflower. Whilst also being the back of someone’s head of course.
John Lally (1914-1994), Woodland Scene (1955)
Funnily enough, Lally’s tree isn’t dissimilar to a Surrealist classic, with its dreamlike flowing branches. It reminds me of the animated film Fantasia before things start to go weird, as if it could at any time close in on you completely as a result of a bad trip.
Gustav Klimt (1862-1918), The Tree of Life, Stoclet Frieze (1905)
Much copied, parodied & stolen, Klimt’s stunning tree of spirals lies between often overlooked human figures. The patterning of shapes & eyes in an Ancient Egyptian style have held a never-ending fascination for me since my teens.
Alexander Cozens (1717-1786), 7. A High Foreground, That Is to Say, a Large Kind of Object, or More than One. Near the Eye. (1770s, exact date not known)
It seems that Cozens was ahead of his time in that he developed a way to create landscape drawings from abstract smudges on paper. This method of working up a picture from splodges was both imaginative & innovative.
Piet Mondrian (1872-1944), The Tree A (c.1913)
Love this. I just love it. It’s one of Mondrian’s final trees & is perhaps as abstract as it gets. “I want to come as close as possible to the truth, and abstract everything from that until I reach the foundation of things.”
David Hockney (b. 1937), Bigger Trees Near Warter (Ou Peinture Sur Le Motif Pour Le Nouvel Age Post-Photographique) (2007)
An enormous work, this stands at 460 cm x 1220 cm & is Hockney’s biggest painting. I imagine seeing it in person would convey something of the size of trees & the space they inhabit.
Peter Doig (b. 1959), Concrete Cabin (1996)
Peter Doig, the record-breaking-priced artist created this slightly unsettling piece that claims to be about a building…but the building is obscured by the trees. It all appears to me to be moving, shuffling towards us. It’s almost as if the trees & cabin are working together to disturb the viewer…& possibly worse…
Tacita Dean (b. 1965), Majesty (2006)
The beautiful photograph & the title, perfect & seems a good place to end.
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