Stump #50, Monoprint, 36cm x 30cm

Stump #50 felt like a pivotal point in my ongoing series of over 300 Monoprints called the Tree Portraits. My confidence had started growing & I now knew that this was going to consume me for some time; this was also the first Tree that I’d decided to overlay with another colour, in this case Gold, & a broader palette became a theme as Spring/Summer started to take hold in London. ‘Stump #50’ was recently presented with 14 others from the series in the 16th Graphica Creativa Print Triennale in Finland, and has since been acquired by the Jyväskylä Art Museum.

in 2020 London’s Pollarded Street Trees (predominantly Lime & Plane, chosen for their resilience to pollution) became something of a multi-valent representation to me of so many things we do/don’t know about Ecology, & Nature’s Real place in our world.​
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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.​
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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.​

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This gets more interesting to me regarding the process of printing them, & the subject, the longer I do them.​
There became 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.​