Remnants of people in paintings

I am doing this new painting of a tree I saw on a walk yesterday in Richmond park.

The tree had a fence around it I assume because it’s so old it’s protected. It had this big gaping hole in the middle of it. I sat and drew it for a time in the sketch notes on my phone. It was an amazing tree, all knarled, I felt like it had a history to it. Mysterious and ancient. It had an aura about it.

So I decided to paint it, and inspired by the painter Tristan Hillier add some clothing hanging off the big hole in the tree.

I want to see what happens when people, or remnants of people having been there, are an element of a landscape painting.

So I started off with an orange primed canvas and a thin, dark brown painting of the form. I actually love the painting at this stage and think it looks better than it does now. It has this eery, spacial quality to it.

Then I added a green shade to the bottom half and a stark white to the top, both smoothed with linseed oil so that you can’t see the paint strokes. Then I added these little pieces of clothing hanging from the tree, which I’ll probably edit again after writing this because they don’t look quite right.

I think I need to add more brown branches on top of the white actually. And edit the pants so that they don’t look like their being worn by a human.

The painting without the clothing is an observation. The mood is subtle, the character becomes the landscape.

When the clothes are added in a narrative appears. Something human is going on but we don’t know what.

It would be fun to try framing the landscape. You know literally putting a frame around it and seperating the viewer from what’s going on by one. A bit like the dioramas. I don’t feel in the mood to build a diorama out of this scene.

There’s this drawing I did of the white sculpture I made on the table of my old studio. I think that’s funny. A landscape within it’s new setting, the studio. Painting that might be fun. But also unless I have a good style it will just be badly painted interior.

I would like to work in board more and more. I’m not loving the texture of cotton duck, the way it absorbs the surface of the paint created with a coarse brush. Board allows the brush to shine through. Okay so maybe not just buying stretchers. Or maybe I use canvas but sand it? And layer gesso enough to cover the canvas? I want to find the cheaper option. Board or canvas? I’ll have to do some research.