Stump #160 (Guston’s Stump), 30cm x 35cm

One-off monoprint — only one available

‘Stump #160 (Guston’s Stump)’ is from my ongoing Series of nearly 3400 Monoprints called the Tree Portraits.

Several previous Stumps had become more anthropomorphic & angular; I had previously christened a blood-red one as ‘Bacon’s Stump’; here, it seemed appropriate that this most Hood-like of trees should be named after my favourite American painter of them all.

In 2020 London’s Pollarded street trees (predominantly Lime & Plane, chosen for their resilience to pollution) became something of a multi-valent representation of so many things we do/don’t know about ecology to me; & nature’s real place in our world.​
​
Their appearance defines an ongoing relationship with Man; indeed, many of them have a cartoon human appearance, with distinct heads, arms & bodies; and because of this back & forth, dynamic process of growth & removal over time the Trees seem to dance in a particular direction, as they struggle (vainly) to grow bigger, both outwards & upwards. They seem to me like huge Bonsai.​
​
There are wonderful areas where growth & weight make the Trees bulge & the bark appears more like a liquid, flowing down around the younger pollarded areas with gravity. This can only really be appreciated from the base, looking straight up.​
​
This gets more interesting to me regarding the process of printing them, & the subject, the longer I do them.​
​
There’s a certain rhythm to doing these in such volume – I’ve tried to represent every tree in my surrounding streets – the repetition of shapes, forms, movement & texture reminds me of a cruder form of Chinese Sung painting, where artists would spend years representing birds, flowers & landscapes thousands of times, until the process takes over & that subject metamorphoses, & almost becomes something else.​