Pine 2009 UPbf

70cm x 50cm (unframed)

Watercolour

The watercolour painting Uber Pine reflects the once vast expanse of Caledonian pine forests. The painting depicts a transition, not only to agricultural logging but from a forested to deforested landscape. With the subtle evidence of heavy machinery in the foreground, the painting is bathed in an angelic light, filtering through the canopy as it weaves in and out of the forest.

I have always placed an importance of woodland in my work, ‘pine like beech has a number of similarities concerned with our associations to the forest and all its connotations. Although, much like the portrayal of the South Downs, this scene is a manufactured landscape in its essence. My intention was to allude to this in terms of repeating the theme of harvest; one of transformation. They are in many ways fairly soul-less, lonely places. There is not a vast abundance of wildlife, they are a strangely sterile habitats due to the limited and specific ground cover; a theme I have endeavoured to highlight. I find them to be eerie, ghostly places, the trees being doomed, the living dead, yet not in an uncomfortable way they are a very peaceful, still and silent.

An important theme repeated through all my watercolour paintings is the heavy use of contrast. The way the long winter shadow of a pine tree follows the contours of the ground has been a subject I have painted for many years. I remember as a child being on a train and looking out of the window, watching the shadow jump from foreground to background and back again and it fascinating me how this happened, the speed of light and our sight, a shadow will follow a shape not just of its object but the ground it lies on.