Going out on a limb

An eclectic group of artists is breathing new life into the time-honoured pastime of painting trees. Laura Gascoigne meets The Arborealists

- Laura Gascoigne

DURING the miseries of the pandemic, it has been particularly cheering to be reminded of Nature’s immunity to such minor distractions as human diseases. As David Hockney pointed out during the first lockdown, ‘do remember they can’t cancel the spring’, a fact triumphantly demonstrated in his recent Royal Academy exhibition celebrating the arrival of spring 2020 in his Normandy garden (Artist of the week, April 7). Indeed, Mr Hockney is not the only contemporary artist whose latest work is full of the joys of spring. Damien Hirst has also embraced the vernal spirit of renewal in a new series of cherry blossom paintings that was recently unveiled at the Fondation Cartier in Paris.

If it took lockdown to make the former bad boy of Britart fall in love with Nature, other artists haven’t needed that stimulus. Over recent decades, a number of contemporary painters have been drawn back to that most British of landscape subjects, trees— and not only in springtime.

Aware of this growing trend, in 2013, the artist Tim Craven, then curator of Southampton City Art Gallery, co-curated ‘Under the Greenwood’, a two-part exhibition of British tree paintings, past and present, at the St Barbe Art Gallery & Museum in Lymington, Hampshire. The contemporary part was such a success with the public that Mr Craven asked the 35 contributors if they would like to join him in forming a tree painting group.