My Work In A Nutshell...
- Jessica White
- May 8, 2019
- 4 min read
Updated: May 12, 2019
If you've read my "About" page you would know my fascination with the Yew tree. Their eerie humanoid forms, rugged and often bleeding bark. They have inspired me and my work, creating unique digital prints to transport the viewer through a portal to a place where people can recognize and reconnect with our ancient roots, connecting back to nature.
I use my iPhone X to capture the natural raw beauty of Kingley Vales Yew trees, then moving to my iPad Pro I can create my prints using my original photo and presence of being at Kingley Vale to guide and inspire me.
"You may walk freely among the dark religious trees, with trunks like huge, rudely fashioned pillars of red and purple iron-stone. One has the sensation of being in a vast Cathedral..." - WH Hudson, Naturalist (1841-1922)
With my work I want to capture the raw beauty of Yew Tree's. I want to express the concern that in our modern society some of us don't often see and appreciate what's around us, we are so consumed with technology and our hectic day to day lives that we tend to blur out and miss the little pockets of nature that surrounds us but when we separate ourselves from technology we become one with nature again, seeing her beauty and wonders.
With the use of the digital software, Adobe Draw, I have developed a style and technique to create dramatised Yew trees, focusing and emphasising on the trees unusual marks, colours, and structures.
I've purposely chosen the Yew due to the trees very unique form but I'm captivated with the Yew's significance to the world, its many meanings and symbols linking to different beliefs from Norce mythology of Yggdrasil (ig-dra-sil) the Tree of Life to Celtic and Druid rituals. Alongside this and the tree's ability to have a sense of immortality feeds to many connections to folklore and literature, this thought of fantasy and the mythical is entwined with how I see and represent my trees I relate and compare my work to old English illustrations and early Disney animation.
(From Left To Right - 'Twisted' 'Abyss' 'Peculiar' - Adobe Draw on iPad Pro, 2019)
A key inspiration of mine is the illustrator Arthur Rackham. I became fixed on how he represents tree's in a dark, mysterious way but with mostly how he uses oddly shaped tree's adding so much detail that each tree had a unique character, this is how I see my tree's.
When I construct a Yew Tree I'm fixed on representing the line and forms that I see, all the individual marks and grooves are of significance, all the little details that make the tree unique and one of a kind. My mission is to highlight the surface of the bark, the patterns that appear, the colours that I see, each Yew Tree has its own story to shear with its oddity and grotesque form.
"If you truly love nature, you will find beauty everywhere." - Vincent Van Gogh
There is a certain irony in my work, with the way I use digital media to represent and capture natural forms and its a humorous contradiction to my goal of identifying our disconnection to nature as I produce my art on an iPad Pro, which in itself is a divide from the natural way of producing art like oil paint on a canvas. As a result I felt the need to create a complimentary collection of work to link with my digital piece that required physical contact with pen on paper, this then led to me developing a collection of continuous line pieces that purely focused of the Yew Tree's features.
Above is a small collection of what I call continuous line sketches. These pieces originate from my photographs just like my digital pieces, but only focuses on the lines and shapes that I see. Due to the process of restricting myself from not removing the pen from the paper I'am forced to not completely concentrate and concern myself with fully representing the tree but to focus on the details. These pieces are like a documentation, an abstracted study of the tree and its features.
Recently I have developed my pieces to now include black voids in them, this helps to break up the lines and gives the work a focus point(s) yet with a semi-abstract appearance. With not fully completing a tree but only taking and adding certain parts I feel that makes the piece more free from itself and its original photo of identity.
As well as both my sketches and digital pieces I also create small photographs that I paint onto. This collection of 2x3" photographs of tree's are a series that I have been building that make up something much bigger than themselves and were inspired by the artist Tacita Dean.
You can read more about these pieces in my blog entry - 'Experimenting Time!'
With the use of white acrylic paint I am able to isolate the tree within the photo. The purpose is again to highlight the tree, the tree is the art, the message is to once again look back at these beautiful giants with new eyes.
When on display I want the audience to look up close and personal with my work, to look deep into it, stirring up questions of meaning and of the process.
How was this made?
Why was this made this way?
Why?
To get people to look again, to think again, to be one with the Earth and Mother Nature again, to get back to our ancient roots.
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