ABOUT

At the start of 2020, I made monoprints of several recently pollarded Lime Trees outside my old London flat, and then the whole street and then all the surrounding streets; I quickly recognized that London’s street trees were something of a multi-valent representation of so many things we widely don’t know about ecology.

I then moved into the nearby parks and woodlands of East London to record stressed, dead or dying trees. Once I moved to Devon, I printed local trees that had been introduced into the ecosystem (Monterrey Pines.); those affected by similarly transported deadly pathogens (sudden Oak death in Ojai/California and Ash dieback here in the UK.); the victims of wildfires (Joshua Trees in the Mojave National Preserve.) and trees that are managed by us (eg. the Woodland Trust in my Avon Valley Woods & Bovey Valley Woods prints.) and their keystone species (eg. Beavers in my 'Little Punks' series.) that will be vital to nature's recovery.

Nearly all of my Tree Portraits are composite gelliplate monoprints, with varying degrees of layering, employing hand-cut stencils and masking fluid for the larger pieces. I came across Gelliplates through my 2018 Great Art Materials prize, & I instantly found a superb way of translating ideas the moment they came to mind. I try to recreate a sense of place and a feeling of unique identity regarding each tree, which I feel is reinforced using monoprints. I am now considered one of the leading practitioners of this medium in the UK, and I have a technical article about the medium published in the current/Summer edition of Printmaking Today.

The Tree Portraits series has won numerous awards and been published in multiple arts magazines in recent years. 15 of the series were acquired by the Jyväskylä Art Museum following their appearance at the 16th Creativa Graphica in 2022 and are also present in private collections in the UK, USA & Europe. Four of the most recent large prints have been selected for the 10th edition of the Woolwich Contemporary Print Fair in November

Archival prints and originals from this series have raised well over £4,000 for both the Woodland Trust & Rewilding Britain, and will also be supporting Moor Trees 25th anniversary through selling 25 prints later this year.

There are now over 350 Tree Portraits.

“No one sees trees. We see fruit, we see nuts, we see wood, we see shade. We see ornaments or pretty fall foliage.
Obstacles blocking the road or wrecking the ski slope. Dark, threatening places that must be cleared.
We see branches about to crush our roof. We see a cash crop. But trees—trees are invisible ”
― Richard Powers, The Overstory (p. 423).