New Work: Quercus Quercus

By now, any regulars here will know Cooper's Hill and the woods that blanket it. You've seen photos, paintings and linocuts. There's a path that runs along the bottom edge of the woods from the Ferrari garage past Mudward to the wizened tree in the April linocut before bursting out of the end of the woods and continuing on to the Runnymede Memorial. Partway along the path, if you care to look over your left shoulder, you will see two magnificent oak trees interweaving without ever touching. This linocut is a study of their winter silhouette.

It is an edition of 30 on Japanese-style washi. The printed area is about 13.5cm wide x 16cm high. I've varied pressure to leave the branches more lightly printed and the core of the trees darker and stronger.

As I'm prone to doing, I have taken a slight liberty with the title. Strictly speaking the trees are called quercus robur, commonly known as the English, French or Pedunculate Oak. If, however, one goes another level up through the taxonomy of plants, it is in the quercus section of the quercus genus (that basically means its in the white oak group of oak trees - you learn something every week here!) so although no-one would really call it quercus quercus if you stretch a point it kind of is. I wanted to call it that though because, just as two identical words come together to form one name, so two very similar trees come together to form one silhouette - indeed in summer they look like one tree with two trunks.

This is just step one on the path to something I find very exciting based on two observations - 1: it is so difficult to work out which branch belongs to which tree I might as well choose for myself and 2: one tree appears more masculine, the other more feminine. This is the final stage of my prep work except I need to change medium, find a different printing technique or work far bigger - any time I tried to shave the branches finer the lino started to crumble.