TIM BAKER

The Dead Tree Series isn’t dead…it’s been only sleeping then over the Spring and Summer it reawakened when I found the spooky woods in Richmond Park. I thought I’d post these before Halloween (don’t worry it wont be a 16,000 word tome like the first Jurassic Jaunt..ouch!)! These gnarled twisty old trees are sandwiched between the eastern side of Isabella Plantation and the Coronation Plantation/Dann’s Pond (which I’ve never been actually able to find?). Looking on OS maps it calls it ‘High Wood’, but I call it Mirkwood, after the infamous Lord of the Rings forest (which is a translation of Myrkviðr the Old Norse for ‘dark forest’).

It certainly reminded me of The Green Wood in Box Hill in mood and feel. Not a place I would lurk after dark.

The first piece was this graphitint piece, entitled Mirkwood in my sketchbook. Something out of a horror film. I don’t know if all these trees are dead, but quite a few are. There are quite a few creepy crawlies too – more of those later. I think the imaginatively titled ‘Dead Tree’ – from March 2021 or earlier is uncharacteristically cheery for this mini-series, with bright colours…it must have been an unusually clear winter or spring day, it has that look.

Similarly cheery looking is ‘On Dark Hill (Undark)’ – moving away slightly from the Mirkwood to Coronation Plantation, near King’s Clump there was a tree in the woods there, not too far from where I drew the Clump and ‘The King’s Standing’. I did the sunnier watercolour piece, then the darker ink piece in my sketchbook which is a first – a vertical tree panorama, with ink wash, brush and candle resist. The area is apparently near the wonderfully named Dark Hill, so hence the Undark Hill above and the Dark Hill below. I’ve just found that the Mirk in Mirkwood means dark or black in Old Norse – so Dark Hill is very apt.

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I’ve posted only a few of these pieces on Instagram so far (when I started work on this via planning for a talk I’m doing to my fellow KAOS artists later, Facebook, Instagram and What’sApp were all down. I realised this when I went to check which of these I’d posted and the correct titles). Those two are ‘Tree Stump Volcano’ – the Graphitone and Graphitint paint piece is one, and the featured image.

One I haven’t posted yet is the appropriately brooding ‘Mirkwood 2’ – a pen and watercolour piece done right at the end of the day, and indeed in the depths of the Mirkwood. Unusually using the Khadi paper, something I struggled with as it tends to work like blotting paper or fabric unless you are very careful about how much water you use or it’s a hot day.

I don’t know what the brown things are – some of the rotting wood or detritus got onto the paper and marked the paper, they look like iron stains? I remember sinking into the ground trying to do this, the area is quite boggy and getting attacked by insects. It’s not a hospitable friendly wood.

And then we get my favourite tree bar the Hollow Tree in Bushy Park – they are tied in my affections for the same reasons – trees that are dead yet live on, either through sheer grim survival or through other species using them as a home. Not sure which is which with this tree, but during lockdown the existing dead tree theme of survival and ‘zombie trees’, and survival in extremis became something deeper, something more personal. To see that nature always lives despite death, or adversity was inspiring and reflected how I was feeling.

I actually painted this tree first in ‘Caterpillar Attack’, forgot I had, then painted the other side, then realised it was the same tree! I came back a third time to do ‘Ensemble 2’ – the ink piece above because I felt I hadn’t got the whole scene properly in the first one. I love the twisty trees. I didn’t record what pens I used, sadly – Ensemble 2 is either a dip pen – that flex looks suspiciously wide for a vintage fountain pen, even my flex pens but could be one of those. And I think I did the first Ensemble with a vintage flex fountain pen. They were then fairly new so I was using them on everything!

The name Caterpillar Attack is because I did this in May, and like something out of a horror film, I found a tiny caterpillar on my jacket arm, looked down and found my legs were covered in them! Climbing my folding stool, legs, I even found one had climbed up to my collar. I didn’t know if they were poisonous to touch so had to use a twig to dislodge them then shake everything out – I even found ones inside my fleece in the flat when I got home. There were hundreds of them – dropping from trees and then climbing up anything on the ground, like my stool or legs.

The problem I had was this happened half way through the piece, so I had to continue then keep stopping to remove them periodically so they didn’t get further up my legs. Not a good way to work. This is a first for me, I might have had the odd one crawl onto my feet or trousers, but obviously it must have been a bumper year for those moths (or butterflies but I suspect given the dead trees it was moths).

As the usual reminder, a lot of these works are for sale – check the For Sale page to make sure, but basically all the single sheet (non-sketchbook) pieces are available. The originals actually look far better than the photos here – like the Caterpillar Attack painting is actually a bit brighter and bolder in real life. I tend to panic when I edit these and pull back the contrast and saturation. It’s so when I sell them, people won’t be disappointed. Same with the Jurassic pieces, they are much more in your face than the scans suggest