The Tree Portraits Series

London’s street trees — mainly lime and plane, chosen for their resistance to pollution — soon emerged as complex, multifaceted symbols of how little we truly understand about nature’s place in our built environment. Their treatment, especially through pollarding, became a visual shorthand for the contradictions between control and care.

Years earlier, I’d been appalled by the sight of pollarded trees in spring — a practice that, I later learned, is sometimes necessary to prolong tree life, reduce urban disruption, and manage cost. But even with this understanding, the image of these shorn trees lingered with me. Despite their disfigurement, they gained a strange, sculptural elegance. They seem to embody both submission and resilience.

Reading Peter Wohlleben’s The Hidden Life of Trees deepened my awareness: street trees are ecological shadows of their forest counterparts. Lacking the mycorrhizal networks that sustain trees in the wild, they live largely in isolation — stressed, managed, but still reaching upward.

In these forms, I began to see characters. Anthropomorphic, even cartoon-like, they stretch and twist over time, reshaped by cycles of growth and cutting.  Sometimes they appear almost like bonsai on a civic scale.

This fascination extended into how I printed them. I attempted to capture every tree on the streets near my flat, letting repetition and variation guide me. The process began to echo Chinese Sung painting — where countless depictions of a subject slowly transform it, distilling essence from form.

In time, the series expanded. I documented ancient trees and stumps in Wanstead Park, along the River Dart near my new home in Dartmouth, and later, the drought-stricken valleys of Ojai, California. There, I was commissioned to portray native species battling introduced pathogens and climate extremes — especially the threatened Canyon Live Oak and, later, the Western Joshua Tree. The latter, now protected under the California Endangered Species Act, became a key subject in recent works shown at the Woolwich Contemporary Print Fair (2022–24), Ironbridge, Wells Contemporary, and the Thelma Hulbert Gallery.

These prints grew larger, using multi-layered monoprints, hand-cut stencils, and painted embellishments in acrylic and ink — a more physical, intuitive way of working. I also explored printing over ghost prints, echoing fungal mycelial networks. 

Recent additions include floodplain trees of the Danube, based on photographs by artist Eva Boda. Another collaboration with photographer Andy Doughty led to ‘The Old Man of Calke’, which helped raise over £3,500 for the Woodland Trust. My focus is currently on the temperate rainforest trees of Devon and the rest of the UK, a recent series of 50 being created for another fundraiser, this time for Moor Trees

What began as a response to pollarded street trees has grown into an exploration of ecology, resilience, and memory. This series has shaped the way I print, think, and work — and led to my being recognised as one of the UK’s leading gelliplate monoprint practitioners. I shared some of these techniques in an article for Printmaking Today (Summer 2024), and the Tree Portraits were central to my Creativepool Artist of the Year award in 2024.

There are now well over 400 Tree Portraits.

This ongoing series is a celebration of the endless wonder of trees, & a recognition of all of nature’s ongoing struggles.

“No one sees trees. We see fruit, we see nuts, we see wood, we see shade. We see ornaments or pretty fall foliage.
Obstacles blocking the road or wrecking the ski slope. Dark, threatening places that must be cleared.
We see branches about to crush our roof. We see a cash crop. But trees—trees are invisible ”

― Richard Powers, The Overstory (p. 423).

©Stewart Taylor 2026