I have just added some new paintings of weird and wonderful trees to my online shop.

£540.00

Original acrylic painting
50cm x 50cm (approximately 19.7 x 19.7 inches)

Dancing Under Your Canopy is part of a collection of paintings inspired by my longstanding fascination with trees, their symbolism and their wonderfully peculiar shapes.

With this painting, I was thinking about the joy of being among trees, the shelter of their branches and the wonderful sense of freedom that comes from spending time in nature.

Built up through layers of acrylic paint, the richly textured surface holds traces of earlier marks and colours and little touches of gold paint that catch the light.

I love making paintings that feel a little like precious, antiquated objects, with their own accumulated histories and details to discover as you look more closely.

It is ready to hang with a cord on the back or can be framed to suit your space.

Artwork details

Acrylic on cradled wooden panel
50cm x 50cm x 2cm (approximately 19.7 x 19.7 inches)
Original, one-of-a-kind acrylic painting
Gold paint detailing
Signed on the reverse
Unique contemporary artwork with a rich, layered surface
Carefully packed and shipped directly from my studio

Inside my sketchbooks

My sketchbook explorations always inform my paintings. Looking back through my sketchbooks, it's very easy to see the origin story of these paintings. My sketchbooks contain a whole forest of trees. Trees just keep appearing, going back years and years.

Accumulated wisdom

I don’t usually copy images directly from my sketchbooks into paintings. It’s more organic than that, for me. Sketchbooks are where I accumulate wisdom about myself as an artist. Sketchbooks are where the way that I make art is brewed and steeped.

When I come to create a painting, all my sketchbook practice, idea exploring and personal symbolism comes out.

Limited-Edition Greeting Card Pack (UK customers only)

£22.00

A small, limited-edition run of greeting cards featuring six of my sketchbook spreads that are inspired by the beauty and majesty of trees.

Each set includes six different A5 cards (15 × 21 cm), professionally printed on beautifully smooth card stock in Hastings. Blank inside for your own thoughtful messages, and paired with white envelopes.

Perfect for sending a handwritten note, gifting to a fellow art lover, or keeping for when the moment calls.

Each pack is wrapped and handpacked with care by me and includes:

A handwritten note
A tiny, slightly wonky, hand-drawn token (each one unique)
The option to add a personalised message if you're sending it directly to someone special

Greeting cards which show various tree related pages from my sketchbooks over the years.

Why do I keep exploring trees?

I think every artist has subjects they return to again and again, fascinations and obsessions that seem to follow them through their work. One of mine is trees.

I have early memories of walking in the woods with my family as a child, and I've always felt a strong connection to the beauty and wonder of trees.

I love their symbolism. Their roots reach deep and their branches stretch high. The shelter and protection they offer. Their resilience, their growth, and the way they transition through the seasons, shedding their leaves, resting and beginning again.

There is something very human in all of that, isn’t there? Our lives have seasons too, and I find something reassuring and hopeful in the way trees weather all sorts of changes and stand tall.

Their wonderful stangeness

And then there's their wonderful aesthetic strangeness.

The twisting branches, tangled roots and peculiar shapes. I love walking in the woods and always find trees to feel otherworldly and magical.

Hidden histories

I've always been fascinated by old stories, hidden histories and the idea that there's more to the world than we can immediately see.

I love old objects. Things that have acquired a patina over time, where you can see their history on the surface.

I like my paintings to have that quality too, things hidden underneath the surface.

Layers and pentimento

My paintings are constructed with layers of paint, adding marks, covering things, changing my mind, scraping back and revealing glimpses of what was there before. If you look closely at the new paintings, you'll find glimpses of earlier layers peeking through.

There's a lovely art term, pentimento, which describes the visible traces of earlier decisions in a painting. The trace of what went before remains visible.

I really enjoy that sense of accumulated history. The painting carries evidence of its own making, and I like being able to see some of the changes and decisions that happened along the way.

There's an interesting connection with trees themselves, which carry evidence of their lives in their bark, knots, scars and branches.

I'm drawn to things that show something of their history.

New paintings

From childhood walks in the woods to years of sketchbook drawings and now this new collection of peculiar painted trees, I imagine I'll always come back to including trees in my art. Their symbolism appeals to me; I feel I could keep on exploring them as a subject…

The new paintings and cards are available in my online shop