Jenny Grevatte's "Trees" series - mixed media artist

I've been working on the theme of trees for, oh it must be five or six years now. I was very drawn to them as a subject matter. I suppose they're a fairly traditional English landscape subject but no one seems to really explored trees in their own right and the various qualities of them, the seasons, the intensity when they're close together in a wood and the light coming through. There's so many aspects it becomes so fascinating but also human beings seem to have such a close link with trees and I'm not so much trying to create exactly what I see but the atmosphere and the quality of light and colour that overwhelms me when I look at them. This one for example, it's only a little apple tree in the orchard that's right next to us and it was just spectacular. One morning, one frosty morning when I went out there it had changed colour completely and become blue and it was surrounded by these very subtle changes of whites and greys and blues coming through and I was very excited trying to recreate that in the studio and as you see I use a lot of mixed media and quite a lot of collage within this one and a lot of the ground left showing and I'm building up layers and using splatter, anything that recreates in paint the kind of textures and colours that I'm seeing out in the real world. As a contrast to that really cold snowy morning, the autumn which is about to come upon us now is fabulous around here and this is simply a row of trees that I spotted up on the nearby golf course. I liked the way you could see the spaces between the trunks and that lovely simple negative shape against the positive shape and then just the mass of the tree. I didn't get involved at all in the branches or the structure on this one, it was just the mass that was important and the intensity of colour. I love these curry paste colour yellows, they're gorgeous and I wanted to bring those out and work them with the greens. This is a springtime one, this was done in Cornwall, it was inspired by a cove that I visit very regularly, St Lloyd's Cove, where you can walk down through lovely woodland with bluebells in the spring and then you come out into a beautiful cove so you've got the blue of the sea, the blue of the bluebells and then these lovely lush spring green colours and it's quite overwhelming and that's usually the problem, how do you translate what is such an overwhelming sensation into paint, not overdo it, not say too much. A lot of splattering went on on this one, literally on the floor of my studio, the paint gets thrown on, sometimes I even employ things like straws to push the dribbles and I drop other paint wet into wet, so you get a very random surface on which I start to construct the composition and I'm very fond at the moment of these long thin compositions, slightly influenced by the English artist Ivan Hitchens, he used this format very effectively and his subject matter was woodland and trees as well and it's quite a challenge because often it can end up divided into two halves and not work as a composition and the idea is that you lead the viewer through and on into that wonderful depth of the bluebell wood. Also in the springtime right next to my studio I have a rookery and I hear the rooks, they get very active when they're building their nests and when I'm pegging the washing out you can see them all coming down and I decided I would try and combine them having done the trees, the life that is within the trees as well is really exciting and I particularly like the jumble of massive lines and structure of the nests that they build and in the winter of course you can see all of that, no leaves to distract you and I've played lovely games here, it's got really quite complicated but I enjoy that with the positive and negative shapes and the constant building up of marks, trying to recreate the energy because there's so much energy with those being built and also the pattern element and it was a wonderful subject and I really enjoyed it and I had to do probably 10 before I got the one that I was happy with and in fact it started out with just nests, the birds didn't make an appearance until quite near the end of the painting, it was like they were demanding to be included.