About
I live in Bristol and draw from nature. My drawings of veteran trees take many, many hours to complete. I am a homeschooling mum and I snatch a few hours to draw either very early in the morning or whilst my son attends forest school. It can therefore sometimes be months from the start of a drawing to the completion. I love to spend that time with a tree, seeing it in all kinds of light and through different seasons. They become familiar to me, like old friends.
The exquisite sculptural beauty of trees has always filled me with wonder. It is impossible to recreate their beauty, but maybe it is possible to capture some of the sheer energy in their form? Their form is somehow beautifully suspended between order and chaos. Every twist and turn is the tree’s response to its environmental and ecological experiences. Their form is inseparable from the ecosystem within which they live and die, and is, as such, a direct record of it. Their form is constantly evolving with the seasons, through life, and also long after death.
The ecology of woodlands is fascinating to me. By spending time in them, closely observing, I hope to begin the process of understanding them personally rather than scientifically. Every time I pass a tree that I have drawn in the past, I feel a comforting familiarity in all its nooks and crannies; memories of time spent in its company; the birds, animals and insects I encountered in its presence. The discipline of detailed observational drawing of a tree takes me into a wordless, quiet state of peaceful receptivity and wonder, within which I can absorb a sense of the slow, intimately responsive dance that has given rise to its particular character. How wonderful it is to slow down like this for a few hours.