I haven't the faintest idea what music I was listening to when starting this piece, but I was very conscious that Radiohead's 'No Surprises' was playing as I touched in the last few additions underneath the left-hand clump of trees.
The initial source for this smallish painting is a Google Streetview image in Richmond Park, London.
Just for change it's more about the near group of trees and their shadows rather than the sky. It's late summer, so the foliage is very dark, and the grass is dry and yellow with drought, which sets up up an interesting tonal situation. The central tree's trunk has ben narrowed slightly, as I couldn't make the source's original huge girth credible. I suspect it's a very old tree indeed – the others are young clumps of three – and has probably had some thinning out work done to preserve its crown and to keep it from breaking up. What struck me about these trees, along with their dark tone and symmetry, was the flat uniform bottom edges. Richmond Park is stocked with deer – a reminder of its original status as a royal hunting park. Most, if not all of the trees in the park have the same level bottom edge - the maximum height to which the deer can reach.
The original sky wasn't that interesting, so the final source image was a construct of bits of streetview from up the road in Richmond Park, and some clouds I had snapped from up the road in Edinburgh last year. The original patches of blue sky behind the the cumulus were very much desaturated to monochrome - fake altostratus, maybe? - but the slight blues and pinks of the distance were very much retained, and, in hindsight, should maybe have been exaggerated a little.
This piece was begun ages ago, with tight drawing and rather weak, indecisive paint washes. Restarting it in January with thicker, more opaque, paint brought a bit more solidity and purpose, so I'm quite happy with that, even though it took far too many sessions to do. The sky and ground are treated completely differently; the sky has loose and slippery walnut oil (plus cobalt driers!) as a medium – with M. Graham's Titanium White in Walnut oil – while the ground and trees have a stickier Stand Oil/Damar varnish medium. This gives the sky and clouds a softness that the ground doesn't require. (I do quite like the softness of the sky paint and its undramatically narrow tone range)
The title 'Seven Trees' is fairly generic, but I think that you can see – especially from looking closely at the source link – that the subjects are Oak trees. However, to title the painting 'Seven Oaks' would be to mislead the viewer into thinking that this was Sevenoaks, in Kent. Which it most definitely is not.
What you can't see here, no matter how closely you look, are the myriads of Ring-necked Parakeets that have made Richmond Park and South West London their home. There is an abundance of theories on how they got there, but however that happened they are now firmly resident and are spreading northwards, and even – according to this article – (gulp) to Edinburgh. I haven't seen any yet, but I did see a buzzard wheeling above our neighbourhood just last week.
Maybe it was keeping a keen eye out for parakeets...
