What do trees represent?
“In our current times, young saplings offer hope, some relief from the pain, from the anxiety happening now. They frame the future and the past, and exist in the present. So fragile and delicate, growing into a future way beyond us.”
(Quote from Andrew’s notebook)
Being within trees, among trees, reminds us of who we are and where we came from. The word ‘within’ implies ‘without’. Without trees, humans would not exist, let alone survive. Our existence is interwoven with that of trees. They are not merely a resource, though they have provided a means for us to build and to keep warm since the dawn of human time. The biosphere, the air we breath, exists as a result of photosynthesis. We are in the biosphere, there is no out of it. Trees are a vital part of the lives of many living things, beyond humans. Our lives are within trees. I am interested in Inscendence rather than Transcendence; climbing into the world rather than escaping from it.
Trees are quite literally made from air, partly from the carbon we exhale, an exchange. This is a fact that I am constantly amazed by, flagged up to me by The Overstory by Richard Powers. Humans are part of the world that we emerged from, not separate from it. The paintings always seek to show this.
In a personal way, my father was a cabinet maker, surrounded by wood and workshops. His father, who I never met, ran a saw mill in the highlands, near Loch Ness. My life has been entwined with trees and wood.
I live in the Scottish Borders, where we have 18% woodland cover. However, most of this is Sitka Spruce, with only 0.03% native species. A charity, called Borders Forest Trust, is doing a lot to plant native species and rewild depleted areas of the landscape. The vast areas of moorland here was once dense forest, cleared by people. Some of it is being replaced, then left to grow wild. I grew up in the North East of Scotland, where there was a local Community woodland. As an adult, I realise how much this woodland impacted on my development, and later on my work.
A note on the hierarchy of trees – I really love, and get excited by wild-growing pioneer species, such as birch, rowan, and sycamore. They are often found growing on ‘waste land’, industrial estates, roadsides, by railway lines and so on. This is in contrast to singular venerated old trees – they are important too, but I never feel I want to paint them. I like to give attention to the everyday and possibly overlooked.
What is ‘Within Trees’ about, and what will it consist of?
Scots pine
Reservoirs
Lines, human made
Complexity, patterns, equivalences, subjective colour
Winter warmth
I am not depicting trees in an illusionistic sense – the subject matter involves tree forms, but the process of building the surface up in complex, layered, repeated rhythmic marks, and the constant application and removal of paint, leaving behind traces of colour and tone within the surface, draws attention to their physicality. You are drawn into space, and back to the surface, simultaneously.
What sets this apart? What is different about this show?
This is the first show I have done where trees are emphasised as the ‘main’ subject of the work, in the title. Trees have been present in the work for over 20 years. Although the compositions and subjects are familiar from art history, the process transforms the subject matter, especially coupled with the intersection of line drawings. I spend a lot of time when preparing for a show gathering material, sometimes drawing outside, but more often recording through photography.
In the paintings, I build up layers of paint on gesso on panel, through applying and removing the paint. The subject matter gets repeatedly established and then obscured until a balance is reached between surface, subject and colour, somewhere between figuration and abstraction. I am playing with the tension between the depth and the surface, often employing hand drawn perspectival line drawings in space which support the illusion while also subtly undermining it. The linear frameworks are like tilted picture planes, frameworks for seeing through, as much as suggestions of walls or architecture. They are deliberately hard to pin down, and can be read in a number of ways. They support the construct, but also draw attention to it, perhaps causing the viewer to be aware of the act of seeing. They prompt questions around what you think you are looking at.
Colour is used subjectively, originally inspired by a childhood memory of yellow/orange sodium light reflecting on a tree. Artificial light is also key – neon, street-lights, torchlight, car headlights, reflectors – ways we have of seeing in the darkness. The colour is also is something the viewer can connect with in their own way. Very often colour solutions are in answer to the process of making a painting – freeing colour from the constraints of depicting reality. Sometimes you need orange, red or magenta to activate the surface, to make relationships with other parts of the painting.They always take a long time to arrive at and go through many changes. They present a balance, not an opposition.
The word nature itself is problematic, as it suggests that nature is somewhere you go to. Maybe to relax, or commune. In fact, this is an illusion, as you are already a part of it, just by breathing. You can live in the most built up place – you are still nature, still ecological, whether you think about it or not. Timothy Morton (one of most important writers currently on ecology and art) is someone I’ve been reading and absorbing a lot recently, who wrote Being Ecological and Ecology without Nature etc.
This sense of separation or dislocation is what’s got us into all this trouble with the environment. We are entangled, inescapably, with the world we live in. I am suggesting this tension by the presence of the lines, which dice up the surface and play against the subject matter, while still somehow being embedded within it.
Drawing and painting is an active thing – when you draw something, you are looking and thinking – interrogating things. It’s not passive. You are curious, and want to know where this came from – what actually is this thing we call landscape? On one hand it is a real place phenomenologically speaking, somewhere you can visit, spend time in, climb trees, swim.
On the other, we can see it is an invented tradition with it’s own particular histories. For example, the wildness and romance of the ‘Scottish landscape’ is hugely popular just now, and never been more popular, attracting Holywood. But what is it, and where did our ideas of ‘it’ come from?
Art, writing, poetry has helped frame how we see it (e.g. Walter Scott or Horatio McCulloch), and make a certain romanticised version of it popular, which is still promoted through, for example, Visit Scotland. I’ve been meeting this head on, by showing ‘ordinary’ places like local woods or reservoirs – everyday places I visit often. I acknowledge the romantic tradition in the work, but I show it together with a series of human frameworks or structures, interventions derived and abstracted from fences, snow poles, building – interwoven.
The work explores in form the ambiguous and complex relationship between what we call nature, and human aspects of the landscape. Around where I live, although rural, the landscape is almost entirely man-made – field boundaries, planted area of trees, roads, tracks, paths, telegraph poles. This is often referred to as a natural landscape, but farmland is just as artificial as any city. Wildness can occur anywhere, as shown in The Unofficial Landscape by Richard Mabey, and Edgelands by Paul Farley and Michael Symmons Roberts.
The divorce between human and non-human, between nature and culture, never actually happened. The idea that there is a separation is an illusion based on agriculture, Christianity and Modernity, as explored in Bruno La Tour’s book We Have Never Been Modern.
I am trying to figure out these relationships in the paintings. They are like models for me to feel what these crucial relationship are, through the process of making a painting.
Ambiguity is important – ambiguity creates space for plural thinking, and is not – as often mistaken for – vagueness.
Within Trees is on at Velarde until the 27th December 2025.
