Big Trees

In this exhibition my aim was to honour trees as as we do with portraits of important people.  The exhibition involve 24 large portrait of trees all looking up from the base.  It also involved portraits of people looking up at the trees in awe and admiration.  While trying to capture the beauty and strength of the different trees I wanted to also show the threats that our natural environment faces and so on the trunk of each tree are collections of different things like cars or bulldozers that can only be seen on closer inspection of the painting.  Sometimes I had a particular threat in mind like for example military conflict and so would look for a tree that could help display this.   On other occassions I would paint a tree I liked and in the process of painting it I would discover or realize a particular threat that fitted with this tree.  For example one trunk reminded me of craters on the moon and so the apollo moon landing is featured in the trunk (this for me captured the wasted resources and damage done to our atmoshere from the space race).  It was nice to be surprised about the stories different trees would lead to.

I have continued to explore this theme after this exhibition as it seems people like this style of painting and also because I continue to enjoy painting them and benefit from the stories i discover with them.   These paintings are shown in "after trees gallery".   They have been in terms of sales very popular and I have now sold around 40 of the tree portraits.

Paintings continuing in this theme done after the exhibition