The title for this exhibition came from reading a poem to its author, Molly Hawcutt who is 94.

My love of the rhythm’s, cycles and seasons of the British Landscape came before painting. Painting is the hook and medium I found to express a feeling difficult to describe in words. Over time painting itself and its history, is an equal player with the subject in conceiving and creating a work. 

I was looking for an icon for every age. Something relatable to both the provincial and the universal. An everlasting emblem, and yet a modest thing - a presence which spanned generations many times over yet hardly changes in one. I found this icon on Newton Farm - Quercus Robur, the Common Oak.

It is a living object, bearing the wounds of its own history like a person shaped by the environment he lives in. Visually copying this image seemed futile compared with being in its presence. No longer a landscape painting, it became more of a portrait; a numinous presence as well as an object in space. I can walk around it, climb it, lie under it and kill it. The fact it is alive only adds to its mystery. It is a contained system, each part fed by a hidden root. The neck like our own connects the body to the head - a shivering nervous system.

 A painted gesture seemed more honest. Not to imitate but make a new thing, as if to emphasize permanence and temporality in painting.  I stripped the palette down to black and white to remove nature’s color and focus on this gesture and fully acknowledge the hand that made it.  As a result, color seemed to have more meaning.

The tree as giver of life took me back to Siena and the icon Madonna paintings of Duccio. Every pigment has its own history both in terms of place and its use in painting

The color Lapis lazuli has a mystical significance in western painting. Lapis is often found in devotional spaces. Places for meditation. I have never used a color with more personality. Blue is an elusive color, it always seems to recede or hover, as in a distant mountain or in a bluebell wood at dusk. It is also the color of our planet.

This rebuilding of a palette from monochrome has helped me to develop a more intimate relationship with pigment and its power, feeling and history. Like a poem compared to a novel, simplicity is anything but simple and the individual words can have potent resonance.

I work on location but also in the studio, where I am all but separated from my subject except by memory. These works are not abstract or abstractions they are new ‘objects’. They are themselves.

All painting is human gesture and contains energy at the point of making. I begin with something complex and wish to reduce it as if to find an essence and simplicity. If something is not integral to the work, it is left out. Glancing at a hedgerow one can be baffled by the complexity of the mass, but by separation each plant has a name, form and inner life unique to itself. Spend the time and you see the perfect order within. It is a source of vast new knowledge and discovery. 

The image in my work has changed but the making process is consistent and has developed from one written line which comes from the romantic poet John Keats epitaph:

"Here lies one whose name was writ in water."

I draw through a sea of fluid, which sets and dry’s out like a land losing moisture. By working with this process each work is of its moment; not a collage of days but rather a moment, a gesture, set in its time.  It is a hand-written letter. It can suspend disbelief. The bloom of vanished beauty remains.

 Geoff Uglow 2014