White Tree Copse, mixed media model, digital photograph, 2020

I’ve made model trees for a table top forest before and I’ve returned to the idea recently as a starting point for making some new paintings.

Over the last few years I’ve made various model trees; 2D trees, 3D trees made from wire and clay, as well as carved wooden trees that I bought from a shop and painted. Sometimes they were for a specific purpose, such as the touring production of Hansel and Gretel I worked on in 2018 (Goldfield Productions, Directed by Clive Hicks-Jenkins) Words by Simon Armitage, Music by Matthew Kaner, puppets by Jan Zalud). And sometimes I just made them for the fun of it; I find there’s something particularly satisfying about making these tiny worlds. There’s definitely a nostalgic tang of childhood fantasy about it, remembering those hours, that seemed endless back then, of creating alien worlds, castles, moon cities, underwater kingdoms, magical realms; places that could be anything I imagined and that could exist outside all the established laws of the mundane world. In a word, I suppose it could be called ‘play’.

Even now, as a 55 year old man, I still get a thrill out of creating these places, and play seems as important as ever in these increasingly fractured, strained and anxious times.

Mixed medial model, digital photograph, 2016

Preparatory work for a touring stage production of Hansel and Gretel, mixed media, digital photograph, 2017

The trees I’ve made this week are 2D, painted in gouache onto thick paper, cut out and arranged in a 3D space with a sky painted onto card placed behind them. The trees and the photos are quite rough and ready as I’m using them to sketch out ideas for paintings but I do like them as objects in their own right too and I really enjoy seeing how they can transform during the process of lighting and photographing them. I use some simple photo-editing apps to adjust the photos but no sophisticated Photoshop stuff (I don’t know how) .

This time around i’m planning to use the resulting photos as jumping off points for some new paintings. I’ve not really done this to any extent before so i’m curious to see what happens. I want to try and avoid simply transferring the photographs into a painted image, I hope I can take things a step and create something more interesting by moving things into a different medium – we’ll see!

The Dark Copse, mixed media model, digital photograph, 2020