New Work: The Avenue at Ankerwycke

Here we go then, my first response to Runnymede's darker twin, Ankerwycke. This is the avenue of birches which leads to the yew and the picture is 2 feet wide and three feet tall. Try as I might, I can't capture the greens in the photo; as ever with my paintings they are multi-layered and transparent so the colours keep changing with the light and as you move around the picture. I've put up a decent size photo as it does need its scale to work properly - just right click and choose open link in new window.

It had a working title of Ankerwycke Cathedral because when you first step into the avenue, especially on a sunny day and when you're walking away from the yew, it feels exactly like an English cathedral. As a result, and also because the site has likely been a centre for spiritual and religious activity for millennia, I drew on the tricks used by masons when making big religious buildings - I made the tree trunks straighter, more alike and more regularly spaced, I used the gate both to divide the space (like the screen that separates the choir from the rest of a church and indeed like the door that separates the church from the real world) and to echo the shape of a simple altar, I used the leaves to filter the colours for the rest of the painting as stained glass would and finally used the progression of light and dark to emphasise height and lead the eye away from the ground and into a half defined, ethereal far distance. I had to be very careful to keep this subtle - the effect was more important than the devices used to achieve it and I didn't want to ram it down the viewer's throat. This process of hybridising trees and bushes with a cathedral is intriguing to me and very appropriate because the site has seen Christianity (a priory - the ruins are still visible), more earth based spiritualism (there are still activities centred on the yew tree around traditional festivals like midsummer and Lammas) and, quite probably, old pre-Christian paganism too all in the one place at different points in time.

The sections I am most pleased with are the tree trunks, they are economical, powerful and lively. I have scrubbed some small areas back to the vermillion underpainting and where this glows through its as if life-blood is pulsating through them - I ought to take a close up really. I'm less than happy with the top left corner though; I was trying to work in too many contradictions and as a result it just looks indecisive but, since its primary purpose was framing the bright section which is both sky and sunlit leaf canopy, that's not the end of the world so I called a halt as I'm happy with the colour and the texture.