Oil on board, 183mm x 130mm
I made the first painting during a June afternoon in 2003 (and the last one in August of 2006), sitting in a rape crop when the seed pods were a lurid pale green. I have an aversion to the smell of rape, so perhaps I was more aware than usual of the alien aspect of a modern field, with its manufactured crop imposed onto the land. The incredible energy you can sense in a field packed with a single crop seemed to seep into the tree
© Stephen Taylor
Oil on canvas, 1550 mm x 1150 mm
As you move toward a tree, more and more subtleties of colour become visible until every shade of green seems different from its neighbour. The colours for this painting were taken from oil studies made close to the tree. The overall shape of the tree is based on a view from a distance, where it is easier to appreciate the general form. The result is an image with a simple initial effect, like a sign, but with a very wide range of colours. I wanted to make an oak tree that felt both observed and imagined: an emblem embedded in vision
© Stephen Taylor
Oil on board, 360 mm x 300 mm
The approach was Cezanne inspired. I painted several studies without glasses (I'm nearsighted) to help me to attend to the colours. This one is the colour world of the leaves of the outer canopy
© Stephen Taylor
Oil on canvas, 910 mm x 660mm
The paler branches are pollard branches. Oak branches have a zigzag growth pattern that evolved to fit leaves into light-catching spaces in canopies of competing trees. But if an oak loses a low branch, it conserves energy by shooting out a pollard branch, leaves appear only at the tips, where the sunlight is
© Stephen Taylor
Oil on canvas, 1020 mm x 1020 mm
When I was painting this, at the back of my mind was Burnt Norton, a poem from Four Quartets (1944) by TS Eliot that associates a tree with 'the still point of the turning world'
© Stephen Taylor
Oil on board, 183 mm x 130 mm
Walking through wheat at night, I was surrounded by what looked like a coral reef spreading into darkness. But I am not lost because I was here a few hours ago, painting under a blue sky.
There is so much green in the early night sky, it reminds me of an aquarium.
Settling in, I put a fresh board inside the open lid of the painting box on my lap. The moon is just within my field of vision. The oak now has sharp, black, lacy edges with little holes of sky inside. The sky changes to yellow-green closer to the moon and fades to darker and redder colour away from it. The tree sits between these two colour fields with the blackest shade in the centre at its base where I can see nothing. Nothing at all. The painting could be built on this: a tree and faint wheat heads floating round blackness, emerging into colour and shape
© Stephen Taylor
Oil on canvas, 910 mm x 660 mm
Leaf fall reveals an architecture only seen in fragments in the summer. The deepest blue is at the zenith. Towards the sun light bleaches the sky contrasting near black zig-zag branches against a whitening sheet. The scarified hedge reflects the same bright light, creating a screen of beauty and damage
© Stephen Taylor
Oil on canvas, 300mm x 300mm
During the three winters I worked with the oak tree, barely an inch or two of snow fell, and it quickly melted. When it did snow, I got to the site as quickly as possible. I need at least three days of similar weather to finish a small painting like this. If not, I might have to jump in the car months later at the slightest sign of snow in the hope of finishing the painting. Setting up in snow on a clear winter day is blissful. There’s an endless white carpet that is full of interesting unevenness: hairs of winter wheat prick through thin snow, little black holes, blue-violet shadows, and crystals – billions of crystals.
© Stephen Taylor
This photograph is by Ken Adlard, who turned out day and night to record my labours. Altogether I painted in this field for seven years; it gave me two shows and became a kind of home. I've moved on now and am painting water in the Rheidol valley in Wales. But the tree is still there
Photograph: Ken Adlard / New Moon Photography, Diss
